Using the history of Alabama and the stories of her pioneering ancestors, Lella Warren created the Whetstone clan who settled Alabama in the 1820s, helped lead it into the prosperity of the 1850s, and fought for it in the War Between the States. The historical background of Foundation Stone is authentic, but, more, it is a compelling story about believable characters. The story of these people—three generations of Whetstones—captures the American pioneering spirit. As an unidentified reviewer described the novel, “Lella Warren’s ‘Foundation Stone’ is the long, well-told chronicle of a family that loved and hoped and struggled in a difficult world, unaware that they symbolized an era and a way of life.” Foundation Stone was published in September 1940 and was on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list September 1940-February 1941, along with Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again.
Engaging resources for understanding the importance of bodies and spaces in producing and interpreting persuasive language
This volume collects essays that represent intellectual milestones that are informing sociorhetorical interpretation during the twenty-first century. The essays are arranged into five parts: (1) Topos; (2) Cultural Geography and Critical Spatiality; (3) Rhetorolects and Conceptual Blending; (4) Rhetography; and (5) Rhetorical Force.
Features:
This major synthesis of work explores new evidence gathered at Basketmaker III sites on the Colorado Plateau in search of further understanding of Anasazi development.
Since the 1960s, large-scale cultural resource management projects have revealed the former presence of Anasazi within the entire northern Southwest. These discoveries have resulted in a greatly expanded view of the BMIII period (A.D. 550-750) which immediately proceeds the Pueblo phase. Particularly noteworthy are finding of Basketmaker remains under those of later periods and in sites with open settings, as opposed to the more classic Basketmaker cave and rock shelter sites.
Foundations of Anasazi Culture explores this new evidence in search of further understanding of Anasazi development. Several chapters address the BMII-BMIII transition, including the initial production and use of pottery, greater reliance on agriculture, and the construction of increasingly elaborate structures. Other chapters move beyond the transitional period to discuss key elements of the Anasazi lifestyle, including the use of gray-,red-, and white-ware ceramics, pit structures, storage cists, surface rooms, full dependence on agriculture, and varying degrees of social specialization and differentiation. A number of contributions address one or more of these issues as they occur at specific sites. Other contributors consider the material culture of the period in terms of common elements in architecture, ceramics, lithic technology, and decorative media.
This work on BMIII sites on the Colorado Plateau will be useful to anyone with an interest in the earliest days of Anasazi civilization.
What effects do laws have? Do individuals drive more cautiously, clear ice from sidewalks more diligently, and commit fewer crimes because of the threat of legal sanctions? Do corporations pollute less, market safer products, and obey contracts to avoid suit? And given the effects of laws, which are socially best? Such questions about the influence and desirability of laws have been investigated by legal scholars and economists in a new, rigorous, and systematic manner since the 1970s. Their approach, which is called economic, is widely considered to be intellectually compelling and to have revolutionized thinking about the law.
In this book Steven Shavell provides an in-depth analysis and synthesis of the economic approach to the building blocks of our legal system, namely, property law, tort law, contract law, and criminal law. He also examines the litigation process as well as welfare economics and morality. Aimed at a broad audience, this book requires neither a legal background nor technical economics or mathematics to understand it. Because of its breadth, analytical clarity, and general accessibility, it is likely to serve as a definitive work in the economic analysis of law.
2024 Southwest Book of the Year, Pima County Public Library
A history of how the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam was built and sustained by social inequalities
The second highest concrete-arch dam in the United States, Glen Canyon Dam was built to control the flow of the Colorado River throughout the Western United States. Completed in 1966, the dam continues to serve as a water storage facility for residents, industries, and agricultural use across the American West. The dam also generates hydroelectric power for residents in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Nebraska. More than a massive piece of physical infrastructure and an engineering feat, the dam exposes the cultural structures and complex regional power relations that relied on Indigenous knowledge and labor while simultaneously dispossessing the Indigenous communities of their land and resources across the Colorado Plateau.
Erika Marie Bsumek reorients the story of the dam to reveal a pattern of Indigenous erasure by weaving together the stories of religious settlers and Indigenous peoples, engineers and biologists, and politicians and spiritual leaders. Infrastructures of dispossession teach us that we cannot tell the stories of religious colonization, scientific exploration, regional engineering, environmental transformation, or political deal-making as disconnected from Indigenous history. This book is a provocative and essential piece of modern history, particularly as water in the West becomes increasingly scarce and fights over access to it continue to unfold.
The author's purpose is to understand the philosophical foundations of Hegel's social theory by articulating the normative standards at work in his claim that the three central social institutions of the modern era--the nuclear family, civil society, and the constitutional state--are rational or good. Its central question is: what, for Hegel, makes a rational social order rational? In addressing this question the book aspires to be faithful to Hegel's texts and to articulate a compelling theory of rational social institutions; its aim is not only to interpret Hegel correctly but also to demonstrate the richness and power that his vision of the rational social order possesses.
Frederick Neuhouser's task is to understand the conceptions of freedom on which Hegel's theory rests and to show how they ground his arguments in defense of the modern social world. In doing so, the author focuses on Hegel's most important and least understood contribution to social philosophy, the idea of "social freedom."
Neuhouser's strategy for making sense of social freedom is to show its affinities with Rousseau's conception of the general will. The main idea that Hegel appropriates from Rousseau is that rational social institutions must satisfy two conditions: first, they must furnish the basic social preconditions of their members' freedom; and, second, all social members must be able subjectively to affirm their freedom-conditioning institutions as good and thus to regard the principles that govern their social participation as coming from their own wills.
It’s not hyperbole to conclude that in today’s world, information literacy is essential for survival and success; and also that, if left unchecked, the social consequences of widespread misinformation and information illiteracy will only continue to grow more dire. Thus its study must be at the core of every education. But while many books have been written on information literacy, this text is the first to examine information literacy from a cross-national, cross-cultural, and cross-institutional perspective. From this book, readers will
Foreword by Alan S. Inouye; Afterword by Nancy Kranich
The first of its kind, this important new text provides a much-needed introduction to the myriad information policy issues that impact information professionals, information institutions, and the patrons and communities served by those institutions. In this key textbook for LIS students and reference text for practitioners, noted scholars Jaeger and Taylor
The Foundations of Knowing was first published in 1982. 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 collection of essays on the foundations of empirical knowledge brings together ten of Roderick M. Chisholm's most important papers in epistemology, three of them published for the first time, the others significantly revised and expanded for this edition. The essays in Part I constitute a thoroughgoing defense of foundationalism—the doctrine that our justification for believing always rests upon a self-evident basis. In Part II, Chisholm applies foundationalist principles to various areas within the theory of knowledge, and in part III he presents a history of twentieth-century American epistemology.
"Roderick M. Chisholm's work has been most influential both in the development of epistemology and in the widespread application of his analytic method. I am sure this publication featuring the unification of his views will be of great value to those working on the central issues of philosophy." Hector-Neri Castañeda, Indiana University
Roderick Chisholm is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Brown University. Among his books are Perceiving: A Philosophical Study, Theory of Knowledge, Person and Object,and The First Person (Minnesota, 1981).
Richard E. Rubin’s book has served as the authoritative introductory text for generations of library and information science practitioners, with each new edition taking in its stride the myriad societal, technological, political, and economic changes affecting our users and institutions and transforming our discipline. Rubin teams up with his daughter, Rachel G. Rubin, a rising star in the library field in her own right, for the fifth edition. Spanning all types of libraries, from public to academic, school, and special, it illuminates the major facets of LIS for students as well as current professionals. Continuing its tradition of excellence, this text addresses
In its newest edition, Foundations of Library and Information Science remains the field’s essential resource.
Cultural astronomy, first called archaeoastronomy, has evolved at ferocious speed since its genesis in the 1960s, with seminal essays and powerful rebuttals published in far-flung, specialized journals. Until now, only the most closely involved scholars could follow the intellectual fireworks. In Foundations of New World Cultural Astronomy, Anthony Aveni, one of cultural astronomy's founders and top scholars, offers a selection of the essays that built the field, from foundational works to contemporary scholarship.
Including four decades of research throughout the Americas by linguists, archaeologists, historians, ethnologists, astronomers, and engineers, this reader highlights the evolution of the field through thematic organization and point-counterpoint articles. Aveni - an award-winning author and former National Professor of the Year - serves up incisive commentary, background for the uninitiated, and suggested reading, questions, and essay topics. Students, readers, and scholars will relish this collection and its tour of a new field in which discoveries about ancient ways of looking at the skies cast light on our contemporary views.
In this volume, Michael Jensen and his collaborators present the foundations of an integrated theory of organizations. The theory assumes that organizations are equilibrium systems that, like markets, can be influenced, but cannot be told what to do; that human beings are rational and self-interested for the most part; and that information is costly to produce and transfer among agents. The theory also treats business organizations as entities existing in a system of markets (including financial, product, labor, and materials markets) that must be considered in the formulation of organizational strategy.
Jensen argues that the cost of transferring information makes it necessary to decentralize some decision rights in organizations and in the economy. This decentralization in turn requires organizations to solve the control problem that results when self-interested persons do not behave as perfect agents.
Capitalist economies solve these control problems through the institution of alienable decision rights. But because organizations must suppress the alienability of decision rights, they must devise substitute mechanisms that perform its functions. Jensen argues that three critical systems, which he calls the organizational rules of the game, are necessary to substitute for alienability in organizations: (1) a system for allocating decision rights among agents in the firm, (2) a system for measuring and evaluating performance in the firm, and (3) a system for rewarding and punishing individuals for their performance. These concepts offer a major competitive advantage for organizations.
The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis was first published in 1956. 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 first volume of Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science presents some of the relatively more consolidated research of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. The work of the Center, which was established in 1953 through a grant from the Louis W. and Maud Hill Family Foundation, has so far been devoted largely to the philosophical, logical, and methodological problems of psychology. Some of the twelve papers in this volume are concerned with broad philosophical foundations; others consider specific problems of method or interpretation. The contributors, some of whom are represented in the authorship of more than one paper, are Herbert Feigl, director of the Center; Rudolf Carnap; B.F. Skinner; Michael Scriven; Albert Ellis; Antony Flew; L. J. Cronbach; Paul E. Meehl; R. C. Buck; and Wilfrid Sellars.
Not since Ernest Nagel’s 1939 monograph on the theory of probability has there been a comprehensive elementary survey of the philosophical problems of probablity and induction. This is an authoritative and up-to-date treatment of the subject, and yet it is relatively brief and nontechnical.
Hume’s skeptical arguments regarding the justification of induction are taken as a point of departure, and a variety of traditional and contemporary ways of dealing with this problem are considered. The author then sets forth his own criteria of adequacy for interpretations of probability. Utilizing these criteria he analyzes contemporary theories of probability , as well as the older classical and subjective interpretations.
After its publication in 1967, The Foundations of Scientific Inference taught a generation of students and researchers about the problem of induction, the interpretation of probability, and confirmation theory. Fifty years later, Wesley C. Salmon’s book remains one of the clearest introductions to these fundamental problems in the philosophy of science. With The Foundations of Scientific Inference, Salmon presented a coherent vision of the nature of scientific reasoning, explored the philosophical underpinnings of scientific investigation, and introduced readers to key movements in epistemology and to leading philosophers of the twentieth century—such as Karl Popper, Rudolf Carnap, and Hans Reichenbach—offering a critical assessment and developing his own distinctive views on topics that are still of central importance today.
This anniversary edition of Salmon’s foundational work in the philosophy of science features a detailed introduction by Christopher Hitchcock, which examines the book’s origins, influences, and major themes, its impact and enduring effects, the disputes it raised, and its place in current studies, revisiting Salmon’s ideas for a new audience of philosophers, historians, scientists, and students.
Combining principles of individual rational choice with a sociological conception of collective action, James Coleman recasts social theory in a bold new way. The result is a landmark in sociological theory, capable of describing both stability and change in social systems.
This book provides for the first time a sound theoretical foundation for linking the behavior of individuals to organizational behavior and then to society as a whole. The power of the theory is especially apparent when Coleman analyzes corporate actors, such as large corporations and trade unions. He examines the creation of these institutions, collective decision making, and the processes through which authority is revoked in revolts and revolutions.
Coleman discusses the problems of holding institutions responsible for their actions as well as their incompatibility with the family. He also provides a simple mathematical analysis corresponding to and carrying further the verbal formulations of the theory. Finally, he generates research techniques that will permit quantitative testing of the theory.
From a simple, unified conceptual structure Coleman derives, through elegant chains of reasoning, an encompassing theory of society. It promises to be the most important contribution to social theory since the publication of Talcott Parsons' Structure of Social Action in 1936.
Foundations of Space-Time Theories 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.
The essays in this volume are based on the papers given at a conference on the philosophical aspects of the space-time theory held under the auspices of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.
In the wake of Jean Piaget’s work on children’s understanding of reality, it is generally accepted that by age two, children assume that an object hidden in a box will remain there unchanged until someone tampers with it. Eugene Subbotsky persuasively demonstrates that many children—and some adults—will often accept mysterious disappearances and creations, perceiving them not as tricks or illusions but as actual occurrences. His analysis clearly shows that alongside our everyday belief in object permanence, we also have a set of quasi-magical beliefs that can be activated by appropriate situations and behaviors. The acceptability of these beliefs will vary from culture to culture, and will be widespread among preliterate peoples but less obvious in advanced industrial countries. The author, a Russian psychologist, draws on his own extensive research and examines other taken-for-granted concepts, such as the distinction between animate and inanimate.
Foundations of the Mind, amply illustrated with experimental material, has enormous implications for the study of both child development and the psychology of human beliefs. It attacks our complacent and often culturally biased faith in the nature of reality, and as such will become required reading for all psychologists.
Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580 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 account traces the history of the Portuguese overseas discoveries, following the expansion into the Atlantic island, the Madeiras, and the Azores. It continues the account with the history of Portuguese discoveries along the African coast, at Guinea, the Congo, and Good Hope, then follows the voyages of Vasco da Gama to India and to Cabra, Brazil, and the expansion in the early years of the sixteen century to Malacca, China, and the East Indies. The volume presents not only a useful narrative of the spread of Portuguese empire but also new interpretations and analyses of the Portuguese overseas history.
In 1776 the United States government started out on a shoestring and quickly went bankrupt fighting its War of Independence against Britain. At the war’s end, the national government owed tremendous sums to foreign creditors and its own citizens. But lacking the power to tax, it had no means to repay them. The Founders and Finance is the first book to tell the story of how foreign-born financial specialists—immigrants—solved the fiscal crisis and set the United States on a path to long-term economic success.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas K. McCraw analyzes the skills and worldliness of Alexander Hamilton (from the Danish Virgin Islands), Albert Gallatin (from the Republic of Geneva), and other immigrant founders who guided the nation to prosperity. Their expertise with liquid capital far exceeded that of native-born plantation owners Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, who well understood the management of land and slaves but had only a vague knowledge of financial instruments—currencies, stocks, and bonds. The very rootlessness of America’s immigrant leaders gave them a better understanding of money, credit, and banks, and the way each could be made to serve the public good.
The remarkable financial innovations designed by Hamilton, Gallatin, and other immigrants enabled the United States to control its debts, to pay for the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and—barely—to fight the War of 1812, which preserved the nation’s hard-won independence from Britain.
Is our Greek and Roman heritage merely allusive and illusory? Or were our founders, and so our republican beginnings, truly steeped in the stuff of antiquity? So far largely a matter of generalization and speculation, the influence of Greek and Roman authors on our American forefathers finally becomes clear in this fascinating book-the first comprehensive study of the founders’ classical reading.
Carl J. Richard begins by examining how eighteenth-century social institutions in general and the educational system in particular conditioned the founders to venerate the classics. He then explores the founders’ various uses of classical symbolism, models, “antimodels,” mixed government theory, pastoralism, and philosophy, revealing in detail the formative influence exerted by the classics, both directly and through the mediation of Whig and American perspectives. In this analysis, we see how the classics not only supplied the principal basis for the U.S. Constitution but also contributed to the founders’ conception of human nature, their understanding of virtue, and their sense of identity and purpose within a grand universal scheme. At the same time, we learn how the classics inspired obsessive fear of conspiracies against liberty, which poisoned relations between Federalists and Republicans.
The shrewd ancients who molded Western civilization still have much to teach us, Richard suggests. His account of the critical role they played in shaping our nation and our lives provides a valuable lesson in the transcendent power of the classics.
Viewed alternately as an obstacle to justice, an impediment to efficient government, and a tool by which some groups gain benefits and privileges at the expense of others, public administration threatens to become the whipping boy of American government. In this innovative look at the nation's bureaucracy, Michael W. Spicer revisits the values of the Constitution in order to reconcile the administrative state to its many critics.
Drawing on political and social philosophy, Spicer argues that there is a fundamental philosophical conflict over the role of reason in society between writers in public administration and the designers of the American Constitution. This examination of worldviews illuminates the problem that American government faces in trying to ground a legitimate public administration in the Constitution. Defending and developing the Founders' idea that political power, whatever its source, must be checked, he critically examines existing ideas about the role of public administration in American governance and offers an alternative vision of public administration more in line with the Founders' constitutional design. This book will provide fresh insights for anyone interested in the role of public administration in the United States today.
The political decisions made by the founding fathers were crucial to the success of the early republic. But the economic decisions they made were just as pivotal, ensuring the general welfare and common defense of the United States for decades to come. Founding Choices explores these economic choices and their profound influence on American life, westward expansion, and influence abroad. Among the topics covered are finance, trade, and monetary and banking policy, with a focus on the factors guiding those policies and their end result.
This book redresses the relative neglect of the economic achievements of the founders. It will be essential reading for historians and economists alike.
As pundits and politicians remind us at every election cycle or turn of the television dial, the United States sees itself as the world’s greatest democracy. But what citizens might also hear, if they knew how to listen, is the grinding of two tectonic plates on which this democracy was established. In the venerable tradition of keen foreign observers of American politics, Anthony King exposes the political paradoxes in our system that we may well be too close to see—founding principles of our great democracy that are distinctly undemocratic.
In an extended essay eloquent in its plainspoken good sense, King begins, on the one hand, with the founding fathers who emphasized moderation, deliberation, checks and balances, and the separation of powers—a system in which “the people” were allowed to play only a limited role. On the other hand were radical democrats who insisted that the people, and only the people, should rule. The result was a political system tangled up in conflicts that persist to this day: unelected and unaccountable Supreme Court justices who exercise enormous personal power; severe restrictions on the kind of person the people can elect as president; popular referendums at the state and local level but none at the federal level, not even to ratify amendments to the Constitution.
In King’s provocative analysis, we see how these puzzles play out in the turmoil of our nation’s public life and political culture—and we glimpse, perhaps, a new way to address them.
Recent movements such as the Tea Party and anti-tax “constitutional conservatism” lay claim to the finance and taxation ideas of America’s founders, but how much do we really know about the dramatic clashes over finance and economics that marked the founding of America? Dissenting from both right-wing claims and certain liberal preconceptions, Founding Finance brings to life the violent conflicts over economics, class, and finance that played directly, and in many ways ironically, into the hardball politics of forming the nation and ratifying the Constitution—conflicts that still continue to affect our politics, legislation, and debate today.
Mixing lively narrative with fresh views of America’s founders, William Hogeland offers a new perspective on America’s economic infancy: foreclosure crises that make our current one look mild; investment bubbles in land and securities that drove rich men to high-risk borrowing and mad displays of ostentation before dropping them into debtors’ prisons; depressions longer and deeper than the great one of the twentieth century; crony mercantilism, war profiteering, and government corruption that undermine any nostalgia for a virtuous early republic; and predatory lending of scarce cash at exorbitant, unregulated rates, which forced people into bankruptcy, landlessness, and working in the factories and on the commercial farms of their creditors. This story exposes and corrects a perpetual historical denial—by movements across the political spectrum—of America’s all-important founding economic clashes, a denial that weakens and cheapens public discourse on American finance just when we need it most.
The essays in this volume focus on the different aspects of Italian gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This volume is divided into two parts, with the first part concentrating on the decorations in Roman gardens of the sixteenth centuries, especially the fountains and statue collections, their iconographic programs, and their relationship to contemporary and ancient literature.
The second half of the volume considers two particular sites. The first, a Savoy duke’s villa, is considered through the history of its construction and its relationship to contemporary festivity architecture. The second essay considers a secret garden at the Palazzo Barberini in the 1630s. Also included are illustrations and text from three Barberini manuscripts documenting the plants used in this garden.
The workings of Western intelligence in our day--whether in politics or the arts, in the humanities or the church--are as troubling as they are mysterious, leading to the questions: Where are we going? What in the world were we thinking? By exploring the history of four "cultures" so deeply embedded in Western history that we rarely see their instrumental role in politics, religion, education, and the arts, this timely book provides a broad framework for addressing these questions in a fresh way.
The cultures considered here originated in the ancient world, took on Christian forms, and manifest themselves today in more secular ways. These are, as John W. O'Malley identifies them: the prophetic culture that proclaims the need for radical change in the structures of society (represented by, for example, Jeremiah, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King, Jr.); the academic culture that seeks instead to understand those structures (Aristotle, Aquinas, the modern university); the humanistic culture that addresses fundamental human issues and works for the common good of society (Cicero, Erasmus, and Eleanor Roosevelt); and the culture of art and performance that celebrates the mystery of the human condition (Phidias, Michelangelo, Balanchine).
By showing how these cultures, as modes of activity and discourse in which Western intelligence has manifested itself through the centuries and continues to do so, O'Malley produces an essay that especially through the history of Christianity brilliantly illuminates the larger history of the West.
As a young, deaf Jewish woman living in a small town in Michigan in 1942, Sandra Horowitz felt deeply frustrated by her limited prospects. Even though she had just graduated from junior college, she knew that she had two strikes against her in fulfilling her dream to become a veterinarian. Better to marry Jacob Winter, her parents urged her, a deaf Jewish man who made a good living. Then, Sandra met Rudy Townsend, a hearing soldier on leave before shipping out to the war in Europe.
In just four days, both Sandra and Rudy’s worlds were turned upside down. Sandra’s parents feared him for being hearing and a Gentile, while Rudy’s parents expressed openly their bias against her ethnic background and her deafness. Even so, Sandra and Rudy soon realized that they had fallen in love, deeply and passionately. As they shared the brief time they had together, they learned about each other’s dreams for the future — Sandra’s desire to be a vet and Rudy’s determination to serve in Congress. Then, Rudy had to leave for the war.
Philip Zazove’s novel Four Days in Michigan captures perfectly the power of irrepressible love between two individuals from opposite backgrounds. The struggles they encounter in an era when such differences were never more sharply drawn also reveal great detail about deaf and hearing life. Despite all, their triumph comes ultimately because of their long-lasting individual respect and love.
Who was Acorn Whistler, and why did he have to die? A deeply researched analysis of a bloody eighteenth-century conflict and its tangled aftermath, The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler unearths competing accounts of the events surrounding the death of this Creek Indian. Told from the perspectives of a colonial governor, a Creek Nation military leader, local Native Americans, and British colonists, each story speaks to issues that transcend the condemned man’s fate: the collision of European and Native American cultures, the struggle of Indians to preserve traditional ways of life, and tensions within the British Empire as the American Revolution approached.
At the hand of his own nephew, Acorn Whistler was executed in the summer of 1752 for the crime of murdering five Cherokee men. War had just broken out between the Creeks and the Cherokees to the north. To the east, colonists in South Carolina and Georgia watched the growing conflict with alarm, while British imperial officials kept an eye on both the Indians’ war and the volatile politics of the colonists themselves. They all interpreted the single calamitous event of Acorn Whistler’s death through their own uncertainty about the future. Joshua Piker uses their diverging accounts to uncover the larger truth of an early America rife with violence and insecurity but also transformative possibility.
As Aristotle stated, scientific explanation is based on deductive argument--yet, Wesley C. Salmon points out, not all deductive arguments are qualified explanations. The validity of the explanation must itself be examined. Four Decades of Scientific Explanation provides a comprehensive account of the developments in scientific explanation that transpired in the last four decades of the twentieth century. It continues to stand as the most comprehensive treatment of the writings on the subject during these years.
Building on the historic 1948 essay by Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, "Studies in the Logic of Explanation,” which introduced the deductive-nomological (D-N) model on which most work on scientific explanation was based for the following four decades, Salmon goes beyond this model's inherent basis of describing empirical knowledge to tells us “not only what, but also why.” Salmon examines the predominant models in chronological order and describes their development, refinement, and criticism or rejection.
Four Decades of Scientific Explanation underscores the need for a consensus of approach and ongoing evaluations of methodology in scientific explanation, with the goal of providing a better understanding of natural phenomena.
In his Introduction, Herschel Baker writes, “Although Romance, the dominant genre of secular literature throughout the later Middle Ages, has prompted floods of scholarship and speculation, it still bristles with unanswered problems of origin, development, and even definition.”
Helaine Newstead contributes “Malory and Romance”; A. Bartlett Giamatti, “Spenser: From Magic to Miracle”; Norman Rabkin, “The Holy Sinner and the Confidence Man: Illusion in Shakespeare’s Romances”; and Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton: Revaluations of Romance.”
In this last book by the late Donald Pitkin, author of The House that Giacomo Built, comes a story of the Schorcht family, through whose fortunes and struggles one can see the transformations of Germany through the long twentieth century.
Each chapter of Four Germanys is reflective of generational rather than historical time. In 1922, Edwin Schorcht inherited his family farm, and in Part One, Pitkin traces the derivation of this farmstead. Part Two focuses on Schorcht’s children who came of age in Hitler’s Germany. Part Three has the Schorchts growing up in the Ulbricht years (1950–73) of the German Democratic Republic. The book concludes with the great-granddaughter, Maria, looking back to the past in relation to the new Germany that history had bequeathed her.
Ultimately, Four Germanys reflects the impact of critical historical events on ordinary East Germans while it also reveals how one particular family managed its own historical adaptation to these events.
Japan and the four little dragons—Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore—constitute less than 1 percent of the world’s land mass and less than 4 percent of the world’s population. Yet in the last four decades they have become, with Europe and North America, one of the three great pillars of the modern industrial world order. How did they achieve such a rapid industrial transformation? Why did the four little dragons, dots on the East Asian periphery, gain such Promethean energy at this particular time in history?
Ezra F. Vogel, one of the most widely read scholars on Asian affairs, provides a comprehensive explanation of East Asia’s industrial breakthrough. While others have attributed this success to tradition or to national economic policy, Vogel’s penetrating analysis illuminates how cultural background interacted with politics, strategy, and situational factors to ignite the greatest burst of sustained economic growth the world has yet seen.
Vogel describes how each of the four little dragons acquired the political stability needed to take advantage of the special opportunities available to would-be industrializers after World War II. He traces how each little dragon devised a structure and a strategy to hasten industrialization and how firms acquired the entrepreneurial skill, capital, and technology to produce internationally competitive goods. Vogel brings masterly insight to the underlying question of why Japan and the little dragons have been so extraordinarily successful in industrializing while other developing countries have not. No other work has pinpointed with such clarity how institutions and cultural practices rooted in the Confucian tradition were adapted to the needs of an industrial society, enabling East Asia to use its special situational advantages to respond to global opportunities.
This is a book that all scholars and lay readers with an interest in Asia will want to read and ponder.
An updated paperback version of the book heralded as “a new benchmark in Marx scholarship” by the Los Angeles Times
Before film made them international comedy legends, the Marx Brothers developed their comic skills on stage for twenty-five years. In Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage, Robert S. Bader offers the first comprehensive history of the foursome’s hardscrabble early years honing their act in front of live audiences.
From Groucho’s debut in 1905 to their final live performances of scenes from A Night in Casablanca in 1945, the brothers’ stage career shows how their characters and routines evolved before their arrival in Hollywood. Four of the Three Musketeers draws on an unmatched array of sources, many not referenced elsewhere. Bader’s detailed portrait of the struggling young actors both brings to vivid life a typical night on the road for the Marx Brothers and illuminates the inner workings of the vaudeville business, especially during its peak in the 1920s.
As Bader traces the origins of the characters that would later come to be beloved by filmgoers, he also skillfully scrapes away the accretion of rumors and mythology perpetuated not only by fans and writers but by the Marx Brothers themselves. Revealing, vital, and entertaining, Four of the Three Musketeers has taken its place as an essential reference for this legendary American act. Now, the updated edition adds newly discovered performances—some submitted by readers—and additional information provided by descendants of long-departed vaudevillians mentioned in the book.
Sketched together on a deceptively simple frame, this emotionally precise play uses its spare structure to devastating and darkly comic effect. A brother and sister have received word from their parents’ caretaker that their elderly parents may be a danger to each other. The brother breaks his routine to join his sister and mother on their weekly lunch date in hopes that together he and his sister can get a clearer picture of the situation. As the mother confronts the indignities of age and the children stare down a mounting list of losses and disappointments, an image of the family emerges that is true to life. Johnson gives readers an unwavering exploration of the ways that the love and knowledge family members have of one another creates both hurt and comfort.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press