front cover of HOUSES WITH NAMES
HOUSES WITH NAMES
"THE ITALIAN IMMIGRANTS OF HIGHWOOD, ILL
Adria Bernardi
University of Illinois Press, 1990
Combining her other research with interviews of nearly fifty Italian immigrants of her grandparents' generation, Adria Bernardi has crafted a memorable oral history of a community of working-class immigrants. Bernardi tells their story clearly and with care, interspersing transcriptions and translations with her own recollections and interpretations of life among the Italian immigrants of Highwood.
 
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Housing America in the 1980s
John S. Adams
Russell Sage Foundation, 1987
Housing provides shelter, in a variety of forms, but it is also resonant with meaning on many other levels--as a financial asset, a status symbol, an expression of private aspirations and identities, a means of inclusion or exclusion, and finally as a battleground for social change. John Adams' impressive new study explores this complex topic in all its dimensions. Using census data and other housing surveys, Adams describes the recent history of housing in America; the nature of housing supply and demand; patterns of housing use; and selected housing policy questions. Adams supplements this national and regional analysis with a remarkable set of small-area analyses, revealing how neighborhood settings affect housing use and how market forces and other trends interact to shape a neighborhood. These analyses focus on a sample of over fifty urbanized areas, including the nation's three largest cities (New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago). Special two-color maps illustrate the dynamics of housing use in each of these communities. Clearly and insightfully, this volume paints a unique picture of the American "housing landscape," a landscape that reflects and regulates significant aspects of our national life. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
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Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective
Edited by Eugene N. White, Kenneth Snowden, and Price V. Fishback
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The central role of the housing market in the recent recession raised a series of questions about similar episodes throughout economic history. Were the underlying causes of housing and mortgage crises the same in earlier episodes? Has the onset and spread of crises changed over time? How have previous policy interventions either damaged or improved long-run market performance and stability?

This volume begins to answer these questions, providing a much-needed context for understanding recent events by examining how historical housing and mortgage markets worked—and how they sometimes failed. Renowned economic historians Eugene N. White, Kenneth Snowden, and Price Fishback survey the foundational research on housing crises, comparing that of the 1930s to that of the early 2000s in order to authoritatively identify what contributed to each crisis. Later chapters explore notable historical experiences with mortgage securitization and the role that federal policy played in the surge in home ownership between 1940 and 1960. By providing a broad historical overview of housing and mortgage markets, the volume offers valuable new insights to inform future policy debates.
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Housing and Neighborhood Dynamics
A Simulation Study
John F. Kain and William C. Apgar, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1985

This book assesses the effects of spatially concentrated programs for housing and neighborhood improvement. These programs provide direct assistance to low–income property owners in an attempt to arrest neighborhood decline and encourage revitalization.

The authors used the Harvard Urban Development Simulation Model (HUDS) in evaluating these programs. HUDS, a large–scale computer model, represents the process of housing rehabilitation, the production and consumption of housing services, household moving decisions, and other determinant of neighborhood change. The model simulates the behavior of approximately 80,000 individual households in two hundred residential neighborhoods of various quality levels. Unlike more aggregate models of urban development, HUDS has the capacity to identify how specific housing policies affect individual households as well as particular neighborhoods.

Since program evaluations are no better than the models on which they are based, the authors provide sufficient detail to permit those readers primarily interested in the policy analysis to assess the methodology and to understandhow the policies are represented in the model; a more technical discussion of the model is then presented in appendixes.

Although the simulations focus on policies that induce central–city property owners to upgrade their properties and thus stimulate revitalization, many of the authors' findings are relevant to larger issues of urban development. For example, the analysis of how housing rehabilitation subsidies affect the investment behavior of nonsubsidized property owners provides insights about the link between initial upgrading and sustained neighborhood improvement. The analysis also demonstrates how differences in location, household, and housing stock characteristics affect a particular neighborhood’s responsiveness to a common policy initiative.

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Housing and the Financial Crisis
Edited by Edward L. Glaeser and Todd Sinai
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Conventional wisdom held that housing prices couldn’t fall. But the spectacular boom and bust of the housing market during the first decade of the twenty-first century and millions of foreclosed homeowners have made it clear that housing is no different from any other asset in its ability to climb and crash.
           
Housing and the Financial Crisis looks at what happened to prices and construction both during and after the housing boom in different parts of the American housing market, accounting for why certain areas experienced less volatility than others. It then examines the causes of the boom and bust, including the availability of credit, the perceived risk reduction due to the securitization of mortgages, and the increase in lending from foreign sources. Finally, it examines a range of policies that might address some of the sources of recent instability.

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Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam
Reconfiguring Urban Order and Identity, 1900-1920
Nancy Stieber
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Winner of the 1999 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural
Historians.

During the early 1900s, Amsterdam developed an international reputation as an urban mecca when invigorating reforms gave rise to new residential neighborhoods encircling the city's dispirited nineteenth-century districts. This new housing, built primarily with government subsidy, not only was affordable but also met rigorous standards of urban planning and architectural design. Nancy Stieber explores the social and political developments that fostered this innovation in public housing.

Drawing on government records, professional journals, and polemical writings, Stieber examines how government supported large-scale housing projects, how architects like Berlage redefined their role as architects in service to society, and how the housing occupants were affected by public debates about working-class life, the cultural value of housing, and the role of art in society.

Stieber emphasizes the tensions involved in making architectural design a social practice while she demonstrates the success of this collective enterprise in bringing about effective social policy and aesthetic progress.



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Housing in the Twenty-First Century
Achieving Common Ground
Kent W. Colton
Harvard University Press

The Housing Act of 1949 called for a “decent home and suitable living environment” for every American. The progress toward this goal over the last fifty years is generally a story of success. Kent Colton documents the remarkable progress in the areas of housing production, homeownership, and rental housing, the transformation of the nation’s housing finance system, the role of government, and the place of housing in the economy. However, significant challenges remain and new issues have arisen.

This work looks to the future using case studies developed during the author’s fifteen-year tenure as head of the National Association of Home Builders and includes discussions of real-world problems and the people involved. Highlighting the process of developing and implementing housing policy given the great challenges of working with many diverse interests, the author outlines a housing policy framework based on a set of principles for achieving common ground.

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Housing Markets in the United States and Japan
Edited by Yukio Noguchi and James M. Poterba
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Although Japan and the United States are the world's leading economies, there are significant differences in the ways their wealth is translated into living standards. A careful comparison of housing markets illustrates not only how living standards in the two countries differ, but also reveals much about saving patterns and how they affect wealth accumulation.

In this volume, ten essays discuss the evolution of housing prices, housing markets and personal savings, housing finance, commuting, and the impact of public policy on housing markets. The studies reveal surprising differences in housing investment in the two countries. For example, because down payments in Japan are much higher than in the United States, Japanese tend to delay home purchases relative to their American counterparts. In the United States, the advent of home equity credit may have reduced private saving overall.

This book is the first comparison of housing markets in Japan and the United States, and its findings illuminate the effects of housing markets on productivity growth, business investment, and trade.
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Housing Needs and Policy Approaches
Trends in Thirteen Countries
Willem Van Vliet , Elizabeth Huttman, and Sylvia Fava, eds.
Duke University Press, 1985
Drawing upon research from six continents, Housing Needs and Policy Approaches analyzes the social problems involved with providing housing in the industrialized nations and in the Third World. The book focuses on four areas of concern: current trends in housing in specific Western countries, the role of Western governments in creating this housing, housing provisions in less developed nations, and the relationship of societal structure and housing, particularly with respect to the decentralization of population occurring in many regions.
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Houston and the Permanence of Segregation
An Afropessimist Approach to Urban History
David Ponton
University of Texas Press, 2024

A history of racism and segregation in twentieth-century Houston and beyond.

Through the 1950s and beyond, the Supreme Court issued decisions that appeared to provide immediate civil rights protections to racial minorities as it relegated Jim Crow to the past. For black Houstonians who had been hoping and actively fighting for what they called a “raceless democracy,” these postwar decades were often seen as decades of promise. In Houston and the Permanence of Segregation, David Ponton argues that these were instead “decades of capture”: times in which people were captured and constrained by gender and race, by faith in the law, by antiblack violence, and even by the narrative structures of conventional histories. Bringing the insights of Black studies and Afropessimism to the field of urban history, Ponton explores how gender roles constrained thought in black freedom movements, how the “rule of law” compelled black Houstonians to view injustice as a sign of progress, and how antiblack terror undermined Houston’s narrative of itself as a “heavenly” place.

Today, Houston is one of the most racially diverse cities in the United States, and at the same time it remains one of the most starkly segregated. Ponton’s study demonstrates how and why segregation has become a permanent feature in our cities and offers powerful tools for imagining the world otherwise.

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Houston Blue
The Story of the Houston Police Department
Mitchel P. Roth
University of North Texas Press, 2012

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Houston Lost and Unbuilt
By Steven R. Strom
University of Texas Press, 2010
Driven by an almost fanatical desire for whatever is new, “modern,” and likely to make money, Houston is constantly in the process of remaking itself. Few structures remain from the nineteenth century, and even much of the twentieth-century built environment has fallen before the wrecking ball of “progress.” Indeed, the demolition of older buildings in Houston can be compared to the destruction of cityscapes such as Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo in World War II. But because this wholesale restructuring of Houston’s built environment has happened in peacetime, historically minded people have only recently sounded an alarm over what is being lost and the toll this destruction is taking on Houstonians’ sense of place. Houston Lost and Unbuilt presents an extensive catalogue of twentieth-century public and commercial buildings that have been lost forever, as well as an intriguing selection of buildings that never made it off the drawing board. The lost buildings (or lost interiors of buildings) span a wide range, from civic gathering places such as the Houston Municipal Auditorium and the Astrodome to commercial enterprises such as the Foley Brothers, Sears Roebuck, and Sakowitz department stores to “Theatre Row” downtown to neighborhoods such as Fourth Ward/Freedmen’s Town. Steven Strom’s introductions and photo captions describe each significant building’s contribution to the civic life of Houston. The “unbuilt” section of the book includes numerous previously unpublished architectural renderings of proposed projects such as a multi-building city center, monorail, and people mover system, all which reflect Houston’s fascination with the future and optimism that technology will solve all of the city’s problems.
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Houston on the Move
A Photographic History
By Steven R. Strom, Photographs by Bob Bailey Studios
University of Texas Press, 2016

Houston completely transformed itself during the twentieth century, burgeoning from a regional hub into a world-class international powerhouse. This remarkable metamorphosis is captured in the Bob Bailey Studios Photographic Archive, an unparalleled visual record of Houston life from the 1930s to the early 1990s. Founded by the commercial photographer Bob Bailey in 1929, the Bailey Studios produced more than 500,000 photographs and fifty-two 16 mm films, making its archive the largest and most comprehensive collection of images ever taken in and around Houston. The Bob Bailey Studios Archive is now owned by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Houston on the Move presents over two hundred of the Bailey archive’s most memorable and important photographs with extended captions that detail the photos’ subjects and the reasons for their significance. These images, most never before published, document everything from key events in Houston’s modern history—World War II; the Texas City Disaster; the building of the Astrodome; and the development of the Ship Channel, Medical Center, and Johnson Space Center—to nostalgic scenes of daily life. Bob Bailey’s expertly composed photographs reveal a great city in the making: a downtown striving to be the best, biggest, and tallest; birthday parties, snow days, celebrations, and rodeos; opulent department stores; Hollywood stars and political leaders; rapid industrial and commercial growth; and the inexorable march of the suburbs. An irresistible “remember that?” book for long-time Houstonians, Houston on the Move will also be an essential reference for historians, photographers, designers, and city planners.

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Houston Rap Tapes
An Oral History of Bayou City Hip-Hop
By Lance Scott Walker, Foreword by Willie D
University of Texas Press, 2018

The neighborhoods of Fifth Ward, Fourth Ward, Third Ward, and the Southside of Houston, Texas, gave birth to Houston rap, a vibrant music scene that has produced globally recognized artists such as Geto Boys, DJ Screw, Pimp C and Bun B of UGK, Fat Pat, Big Moe, Z-Ro, Lil’ Troy, and Paul Wall. Lance Scott Walker and photographer Peter Beste spent a decade documenting Houston’s scene, interviewing and photographing the people—rappers, DJs, producers, promoters, record label owners—and places that give rap music from the Bayou City its distinctive character. Their collaboration produced the books Houston Rap and Houston Rap Tapes.

This second edition of Houston Rap Tapes amplifies the city’s hip-hop history through new interviews with Scarface, Slim Thug, Lez Moné, B L A C K I E, Lil’ Keke, and Sire Jukebox of the original Ghetto Boys. Walker groups the interviews into sections that track the different eras and movements in Houston rap, with new photographs and album art that reveal the evolution of the scene from the 1970s to today’s hip-hop generation. The interviews range from the specifics of making music to the passions, regrets, memories, and hopes that give it life. While offering a view from some of Houston’s most marginalized areas, these intimate conversations lay out universal struggles and feelings. As Willie D of Geto Boys writes in the foreword, “Houston Rap Tapes flows more like a bunch of fellows who haven’t seen each other for ages, hanging out on the block reminiscing, rather than a calculated literary guide to Houston’s history.”

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Houston, We Have a Narrative
Why Science Needs Story
Randy Olson
University of Chicago Press, 2015
 Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you’ll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they’ll see dollar signs: moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require.
 
That’s a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a story—and, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic. Drawing on his unique background, which saw him leave his job as a working scientist to launch a career as a filmmaker, Olson first diagnoses the problem: When scientists tell us about their work, they pile one moment and one detail atop another moment and another detail—a stultifying procession of “and, and, and.” What we need instead is an understanding of the basic elements of story, the narrative structures that our brains are all but hardwired to look for—which Olson boils down, brilliantly, to “And, But, Therefore,” or ABT. At a stroke, the ABT approach introduces momentum (“And”), conflict (“But”), and resolution (“Therefore”)—the fundamental building blocks of story. As Olson has shown by leading countless workshops worldwide, when scientists’ eyes are opened to ABT, the effect is staggering: suddenly, they’re not just talking about their work—they’re telling stories about it. And audiences are captivated.
 
Written with an uncommon verve and enthusiasm, and built on principles that are applicable to fields far beyond science, Houston, We Have a Narrative has the power to transform the way science is understood and appreciated, and ultimately how it’s done.
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The Hovering Giant (Revised Edition)
U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America, 1910–1985
Cole Blasier
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985

In the first edition of The Hovering Giant, Cole Blasier analyzed U.S. response to revolutions in Latin America from Madero in Mexico to Allende in Chile.  He explained why U.S. leaders sponsored paramilitary units to overthrow revolutionary governments in Guatemala and Cuba and compromised their own differences with revolutionary governments in Mexico and Bolivia.  The protection of private U.S. interests was part of the explanation, but Blasier gave greater emphasis to rivalry with Germany or the Soviet Union.

Now in this revised edition, Blasier also examines the responses of the Carter and Reagan administrations to the Grenadian and Nicaraguan revolutions and the revolt in El Salvador.  He also brings up to date the interpretation of U.S.-Cuban relations.

Blasier stresses U.S. defense of its preeminent position in the Caribean Basin, as well as rivalry with the Soviet Union, to explain these later U.S. responses.  Seemingly unaware of historical experience, Washington followed patterns in Central America and Grenada similar to earlier patterns in Guatemala, Cuba, and Chile even though the latter had adverse effects on U.S. security and economic interests.

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How
Geoff Wyss
The Ohio State University Press, 2012

 If every story is born of a questionHow did we get here? How do you make your arm do that?—the stories in Geoff Wyss’s How search for answers to the mysteries of an astonishing range of characters. The narrator of “How I Come to Be Here at the GasFast” explains why he hasn’t left a truck stop in the two days since he scratched a winning lottery ticket. In “How to Be a Winner,” a sports consultant browbeats a high school football team with his theory of history and a justification of his failed coaching career. Lost in the mazes they’ve made of themselves, Wyss’s characters search for exits on ground that shifts dizzyingly from humor to pathos, from cynicism to earnestness, from comedy to tragedy, often within the same sentence. Although propelled by a razor-sharp, contemporary voice, Wyss’s stories—many set in a New Orleans unknown to television and tourists—have more in common with Chekhov and O’Connor than with “Treme.”

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How a Century of War Changed the Lives of Women
Lindsey German
Pluto Press, 2013

How a Century of War Changed the Lives of Women looks at the remarkable impact of war on women in Britain. It shows how conflict has changed women’s lives and how those changes have put women at the centre of peace campaigning.

Lindsey German, one of the UK's leading anti-war activists and commentators, shows how women have played a central role in anti-war and peace movements, including the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The women themselves talk about how they overcame prejudice and difficulty to become active. The book integrates this experience with a historical overview, analysing the two world wars as catalysts of social change for women. It looks at how the changing nature of war, especially the involvement of civilians, increasingly involves significant numbers of women.

As well as providing an inspiring account of women's opposition to war, the book also tackles key contemporary developments, challenging negative assumptions about Muslim women and showing how anti-war movements are feeding into a broader desire to change society.

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How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture
Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State
Mary K. Coffey
Duke University Press, 2012
A public art movement initiated by the postrevolutionary state, Mexican muralism has long been admired for its depictions of popular struggle and social justice. Mary K. Coffey revises traditional accounts of Mexican muralism by describing how a radical art movement was transformed into official culture, ultimately becoming a tool of state propaganda. Analyzing the incorporation of mural art into Mexico's most important public museums—the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum—Coffey illuminates the institutionalization of muralism and the political and aesthetic issues it raised. She focuses on the period between 1934, when José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera were commissioned to create murals in the Palace of Fine Arts, through the crisis of state authority in the 1960s. Coffey highlights a reciprocal relationship between Mexico's mural art and its museums. Muralism shaped exhibition practices, which affected the politics, aesthetics, and reception of mural art. Interpreting the iconography of Mexico's murals, she focuses on representations of mestizo identity, the preeminent symbol of postrevolutionary Mexico. Coffey argues that those gendered representations reveal a national culture project more invested in race and gender inequality than in race and class equality.
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How America Became Capitalist
Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West
James Parisot
Pluto Press, 2019
No nation in the history of the world has been more closely identified with capitalism than the United States. Capitalism, politicians and business leaders confidently assert, is and always has been at the heart of the American dream.

Not so fast, says James Parisot. In How America Became Capitalist, he tells the little-known story of how our economic system came to be, and of the alternatives that were sidelined along the way. Capitalist elements were apparent from the first colonies of white settlers, but they were far from dominant, and they weren’t the driving factor in the advancement of colonies deeper into the continent. Even slavery, which was at the heart of both American capitalism and imperialism throughout much of the nation’s growth, was less a monolithic force than a series of complicated encounters that took different forms. Individual difference slowed the homogenization of capitalism as well, as transgender people, gays and lesbians, and people in interracial relationships all brought complexity to the market’s idea of the typical household.

At a moment when the long-term viability of capitalism is coming increasingly into question, How America Became Capitalist reminds us that the path to its dominance was never so smooth, nor so complete, as its champions would have us believe.
 
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How America Gets Away with Murder
Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity
Michael Mandel
Pluto Press, 2004

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How America Met the Jews
Hasia R. Diner
SBL Press, 2017

Explore how American conditions and Jewish circumstances collided in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

In this new book award-winning author Hasia R. Diner explores the issues behind why European Jews overwhelmingly chose to move to the United States between the 1820s and 1920s. Unlike books that tend to romanticize American freedom as the force behind this period of migration or that tend to focus on Jewish contributions to America or that concentrate on how Jewish traditions of literacy and self-help made it possible for them to succeed, Diner instead focuses on aspects of American life and history that made it the preferred destination for 90 percent of European Jews.

Features:

  • Examination of the realities of race, immigration, color, money, economic development, politics, and religion in America
  • Exploration of an America agenda that sought out white immigrants to help stoke economic development and that valued religion as a force for morality
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How and Why to Read and Create Children's Digital Books
A Guide for Primary Practitioners
Natalia Kucirkova
University College London, 2018
How and Why to Read and Create Children’s Digital Books outlines effective ways of using digital books in early years and primary classrooms, and specifies the educational potential of using digital books and apps in physical spaces and virtual communities. With a particular focus on apps and personalized reading, Natalia Kucirkova combines theory and practice to argue that personalized reading is only truly personalized when it is created or cocreated by reading communities. Part I suggests criteria to evaluate the educational quality of digital books and practical strategies for their use in the classroom. Specific attention is paid to the ways in which digital books can support individual children’s strengths and difficulties, digital literacies, and language and communication skills . Part II explores digital books created by children, caregivers, teachers, and librarians and offers insights into how smart toys can likewise enrich children’s reading for pleasure.
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How Animals Grieve
Barbara J. King
University of Chicago Press, 2013
From the time of our earliest childhood encounters with animals, we casually ascribe familiar emotions to them. But scientists have long cautioned against such anthropomorphizing, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we can—and should—attend to animal emotions. With How Animals Grieve, she draws our attention to the specific case of grief, and relates story after story—from fieldsites, farms, homes, and more—of animals mourning lost companions, mates, or friends.
 
King tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. A housecat loses her sister, from whom she's never before been parted, and spends weeks pacing the apartment, wailing plaintively. A baboon loses her daughter to a predator and sinks into grief. In each case, King uses her anthropological training to interpret and try to explain what we see—to help us understand this animal grief properly, as something neither the same as nor wholly different from the human experience of loss.
 
The resulting book is both daring and down-to-earth, strikingly ambitious even as it’s careful to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. Through the moving stories she chronicles and analyzes so beautifully, King brings us closer to the animals with whom we share a planet, and helps us see our own experiences, attachments, and emotions as part of a larger web of life, death, love, and loss.

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How Art Can Be Thought
A Handbook for Change
Al-An deSouza
Duke University Press, 2018
What terms do we use to describe and evaluate art, and how do we judge if art is good, and if it is for the social good? In How Art Can Be Thought Allan deSouza investigates such questions and the popular terminology through which art is discussed, valued, and taught. Adapting art viewing to contemporary demands within a rapidly changing world, deSouza outlines how art functions as politicized culture within a global industry. In addition to offering new pedagogical strategies for MFA programs and the training of artists, he provides an extensive analytical glossary of some of the most common terms used to discuss art while focusing on their current and changing usage. He also shows how these terms may be crafted to new artistic and social practices, particularly in what it means to decolonize the places of display and learning. DeSouza's work will be invaluable to the casual gallery visitor and the arts professional alike, to all those who regularly look at, think about, and make art—especially art students and faculty, artists, art critics, and curators.
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How Belfast Got the Blues
A Cultural History of Popular Music in the 1960s
Noel McLaughlin and Joanna Braniff
Intellect Books, 2020

Was the first white European blues singer an Irish woman? What links The Rolling Stones to the birth of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement? Did the state suppress the work of a key countercultural director because his film was shot in Belfast in 1965?

This book provides the answers in an engaging and dynamic reconsideration of Belfast’s long-ignored contributions to the popular music and cultural politics of the 1960s. In an expansive socio-cultural history, Noel McLaughlin and Joanna Braniff explore how popular music engaged with and influenced the global cultural and political currents of the decade.

The popular history of Northern Ireland has been overshadowed by the violence of the Troubles. But How Belfast Got the Blues offers a corrective, reconsidering the period before 1969 and arguing that popular music in Northern Ireland was central to the politics of the time, in ways not previously understood or explored. In addition to big names like Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher, the authors highlight lesser-known artists—notably Ottilie Patterson, Ireland's first blues singer—and restore them to music history. By intertwining politics, culture, and key personalities, the authors reexamine this radical decade and the complex but essential relationship between music and identity in a place where it could mean the difference between life and death.

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How Celia Changed Her Mind and Selected Stories
Rose Terry Cooke
Ammons, Elizabeth
Rutgers University Press, 1986
This anthology of fiction by Rose Terry Cooke contains eleven stories, drawn together for the first time in one volume, that reflect the whole spectrum of Cooke's career from the 1850s to the 1890s. It restores to American literature the work of a writer highly admired in her own day and increasingly recognized today as an important figure in the development of realism, the evolution of regionalism as a literary form, and the emergence of women writers in nineteenth-century fiction.

Cooke's stories are rich literarily and historically; her command of dialect, ear for dialogue, dramatic sense, and ability to draw interesting, memorable characters all distinguish her work. This reissue of some of her best work represents an important contribution to the canon of American literature.
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How Cities Work
Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken
By Alex Marshall
University of Texas Press, 2001

Do cities work anymore? How did they get to be such sprawling conglomerations of lookalike subdivisions, megafreeways, and "big box" superstores surrounded by acres of parking lots? And why, most of all, don't they feel like real communities? These are the questions that Alex Marshall tackles in this hard-hitting, highly readable look at what makes cities work.

Marshall argues that urban life has broken down because of our basic ignorance of the real forces that shape cities-transportation systems, industry and business, and political decision making. He explores how these forces have built four very different urban environments-the decentralized sprawl of California's Silicon Valley, the crowded streets of New York City's Jackson Heights neighborhood, the controlled growth of Portland, Oregon, and the stage-set facades of Disney's planned community, Celebration, Florida.

To build better cities, Marshall asserts, we must understand and intelligently direct the forces that shape them. Without prescribing any one solution, he defines the key issues facing all concerned citizens who are trying to control urban sprawl and build real communities. His timely book will be important reading for a wide public and professional audience.

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How Climate Change Comes to Matter
The Communal Life of Facts
Candis Callison
Duke University Press, 2014
During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility.

The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.
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How College Works
Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs
Harvard University Press, 2013

A Chronicle of Higher Education “Top 10 Books on Teaching” Selection
Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize

Constrained by shrinking budgets, can colleges do more to improve the quality of education? And can students get more out of college without paying higher tuition? Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs conclude that the limited resources of colleges and students need not diminish the undergraduate experience. How College Works reveals the surprisingly decisive role that personal relationships play in determining a student's collegiate success, and puts forward a set of small, inexpensive interventions that yield substantial improvements in educational outcomes.

“The book shares the narrative of the student experience, what happens to students as they move through their educations, all the way from arrival to graduation. This is an important distinction. [Chambliss and Takacs] do not try to measure what students have learned, but what it is like to live through college, and what those experiences mean both during the time at school, as well as going forward.”
—John Warner, Inside Higher Ed

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How Comics Travel
Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Winner, 2023 Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work
Honorable Mention, 2023 CSS Charles Hatfield Book Prize


In How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins challenges the clichéd understanding of comics as a “universal” language, circulating without regard for cultures or borders. Instead, she develops a new methodology of reading for difference. Kelp-Stebbins’s anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist analytical framework engages with comics as sites of struggle over representation in a diverse world. Through comparative case studies of Metro, Tintin, Persepolis, and more, she explores the ways in which graphic narratives locate and dislocate readers in every phase of a transnational comic’s life cycle according to distinct visual, linguistic, and print cultures. How Comics Travel disengages from the constrictive pressures of nationalism and imperialism, both in comics studies and world literature studies more broadly, to offer a new vision of how comics depict and enact the world as a transcultural space.
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How Corrupt Is Britain?
Edited by David Whyte
Pluto Press, 2015
Banks accused of rate-fixing. Members of parliament cooking the books. Major defense contractors investigated over suspect arms deals. Police accused of being paid off by tabloids. The headlines are unrelenting these days. Perhaps it’s high time we ask: Just exactly how corrupt is Britain?
            David Whyte brings together a wide range of leading commentators and campaigners, offering a series of troubling answers. Unflinchingly facing the corruption in British public life, they show that it is no longer tenable to assume that corruption is something that happens elsewhere; corrupt practices are revealed across a wide range of venerated institutions, from local government to big business. These powerful, punchy essays aim to shine a light on the corruption fundamentally embedded in UK politics, police, and finance.
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How COVID-19 Took Over the World
Lessons for the Future
Edited by Christine Loh
Hong Kong University Press, 2023
This analysis of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic will help health professionals and policymakers move forward.

The pandemic left disorder and crises in its wake everywhere it struck. Drawing on disciplines including public health, politics, and socioeconomics, this book tracks the spread of COVID-19 to weave a coherent picture that explains how scientists learned about the virus, how authorities reacted around the world, and how different societies coped.

Written by a leading team of public health, policy, and economics experts, How COVID-19 Took Over the World provides an in-depth analysis of various countries’ responses to the pandemic, as well as suggestions to increase the capability to fight future pandemics. The first part of the book provides an overview of global governance and international cooperation, the economic and social consequences of the outbreak, and breakthroughs in mathematical modeling and COVID-19 vaccines. The second part of the book examines and compares specific countries and regions through the lens of good governance, social contract, and political trust.

How COVID-19 Took Over the World is essential for anyone seeking to learn from the impact of COVID-19, particularly professionals and policymakers, as well as those with a general interest in governance and pandemics.
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How Dark Is My Flower
Yosano Akiko and the Invention of Romantic Love
Leith Morton
University of Michigan Press, 2023
The poetry of Yosano Akiko covers all the many and varied aspects of the experience of love—from early romantic encounters between the lover and beloved to the intimate pleasures of mutual infatuation and then true love. The journey outlined in Akiko’s verse also grapples with jealousy and unrequited passion, as Akiko’s poem-narrative treats  the rivalry between herself and her best friend, the poet Yamakawa Tomiko, for the affection of the dashing young literary lion, Yosano Tekkan, who later became Akiko’s husband. Thus, How Dark Is My Flower: Yosano Akiko and the Invention of Romantic Love tells a number of stories: a real-life romance unfolds in the poetry of these three poets examined in the book, as well as the story of the journey from romanticism to modernism   undertaken by early 20th century Japanese poetry.

How Dark Is My Flower emphasizes the astonishing innovations in diction and style, not to mention content, in Akiko’s work that transformed the tanka genre from a hidebound and conservative mode of verse to something much more daring and modern. This book pays particular attention to poetry, particularly the tanka genre, in the evolution of modernism  in Japanese literature and breaks new ground in the study of modern Japanese literature by examining the invention and evolution of the concept of romantic love.
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How Democracies Live
Power, Statecraft, and Freedom in Modern Societies
Stein Ringen
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Times have not been kind to democracy. This book is in its defense.

In the new century, the triumph of democracy at the end of the Cold War turned to retrenchment. The core democracies, in America and Britain, succumbed to polarization and misrule. Dictatorships, such as China, made themselves assertive. New democracies in Central Europe turned to muddled ideologies of “illiberal democracy.” In this book, Stein Ringen offers a meditation on what democracy is, the challenges it faces, and how it can be defended. Ringen argues that democracy must be rooted in a culture that supports the ability of citizens to exchange views and information among themselves and with their rulers.
 
Drawing on the ideas of Machiavelli, Aristotle, Tocqueville, Max Weber, and others, Ringen shows how power is the fuel of government, and statecraft turns power into effective rule. Democracy should prize freedom and minimizing unfairness, especially poverty. Altogether, Ringen offers powerful insight on the meaning of democracy, including a new definition, and how countries can improve upon it and make it function more effectively. Timely and thought-provoking, How Democracies Live is a sober reminder of the majesty of the democratic enterprise. 
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How Democracy Works
Political Representation and Policy Congruence in Modern Societies
Edited by Martin Rosema, Bas Denters, and Kees Aarts
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

In this book, a group of leading scholars analyzes the functioning of modern democracies by focusing on two basic principles: political representation and policy congruence. Drawing on recent survey data from a variety of national and international research projects, they demonstrate how political representation works and mostly leads to a fair degree of policy congruence between citizens and their representatives. They also present new insights on the sources of satisfaction with democracy and the impact of the economy on elections and political trust.

 This book is published on the occasion of the retirement of Jacques Thomassen as distinguished professor of political science at the University of Twente. The contributors include Russell Dalton, Hans‐Dieter Klingemann, Pippa Norris, Ola Listhaug, Hanne Marthe Narud, Jan van Deth, Peter Mair, Cees van der Eijk, Hermann Schmitt, Sören Holmberg and Rudy Andeweg.

 
Martin Rosema, Bas Denters and Kees Aarts are affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) and the Institute for Innovation and Governance Studies (IGS) at the University of Twente.

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How Development Projects Persist
Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs
Erin Beck
Duke University Press, 2017
In How Development Projects Persist Erin Beck examines microfinance NGOs working in Guatemala and problematizes the accepted wisdom of how NGOs function. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, she shows how development models and plans become entangled in the relationships among local actors in ways that alter what they are, how they are valued, and the conditions of their persistence. Beck focuses on two NGOs that use drastically different methods in working with poor rural women in Guatemala. She highlights how each program's beneficiaries—diverse groups of savvy women—exercise their agency by creatively appropriating, resisting, and reinterpreting the lessons of the NGOs to match their personal needs. Beck uses this dynamic—in which the goals of the developers and women do not often overlap—to theorize development projects as social interactions in which policymakers, workers, and beneficiaries critically shape what happens on the ground. This book displaces the notion that development projects are top-down northern interventions into a passive global south by offering a provocative account of how local conditions, ongoing interactions, and even fundamental tensions inherent in development work allow such projects to persist, but in new and unexpected ways.
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How Did Poetry Survive?
The Making of Modern American Verse
John Timberman Newcomb
University of Illinois Press, 2013

This book traces the emergence of modern American poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century. With a particular focus on four "little magazines"--Poetry, The Masses, Others, and The Seven Arts--John Timberman Newcomb shows how each advanced ambitious agendas combining urban subjects, stylistic experimentation, and progressive social ideals. While subsequent literary history has favored the poets whose work made them distinct--individuals singled out usually on the basis of a novel technique--Newcomb provides a denser, richer view of the history that hundreds of poets made.

 
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How Did You Get To Be Mexican
Kevin R. Johnson
Temple University Press, 1999
During an interview for a faculty position, a senior professor asked Kevin Johnson bluntly, "How  did you get to be a Mexican?" And, a young woman at a Harvard Law School dinner party inquired, "Are you one of those people whose high school friends are all dead from gangs and stuff?" The son of a Mexican American mother and an Anglo father, Professor Johnson has spent his life in the borderlands between racial identities. In this insightful book, he uses his experiences as  a mixed Latino Anglo to examine issues of diversity, assimilation, race relations, and affirmative action in the contemporary United States.

Johnson also grew up in the borderlands  between classes. He spent his childhood with his mother, first on welfare and  then with a racist working-class stepfather. As an adolescent, he moved to his father's home in a predominantly upper-middle-class suburb. His educational experiences too extend from a racially mixed elementary school to an all-white high school, and  from Berkeley to Harvard Law School. From this vantage point, he analyzes the intersection of race  and class in the United States.

This book looks not just at the question "Who is a Latino?" but also at the question of where persons of mixed Anglo-Latino heritage fit into the racial dynamics of the United States. Professor Johnson's mother was an ardent assimilationist who classified herself as "Spanish"; her failure to become a part o f middle America led her into depression and eventually mental illness. Her son has woven not just her experiences and his own, but also those of friends and relatives, into a complex and  moving story of one white/brown man's search for identity.
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How Difficult It Is to Be God
Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980–1999
Carlos Iván Degregori; Edited and with an introduction by Steve J. Stern; Translated by Nancy Appelbaum, Joanna Drzewieniecki, Héctor Flores, Eric Hershberg, Judy Rein, Steve J. Stern, and Kimberly Theidon
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
The revolutionary war launched by Shining Path, a Maoist insurgency, was the most violent upheaval in modern Peru’s history, claiming some 70,000 lives in the 1980s–1990s and drawing widespread international attention. Yet for many observers, Shining Path’s initial successes were a mystery. What explained its cult-like appeal, and what actually happened inside the Andean communities at war?
    In How Difficult It Is to Be God, Carlos Iván Degregori—the world’s leading expert on Shining Path and the intellectual architect for Peru’s highly regarded Truth and Reconciliation Commission—elucidates the movement’s dynamics. An anthropologist who witnessed Shining Path’s recruitment of militants in the 1970s, Degregori grounds his findings in deep research and fieldwork. He explains not only the ideology and culture of revolution among the insurgents, but also their capacity to extend their influence to university youths, Indian communities, and competing social and political movements.
    Making Degregori’s most important work available to English-language readers for the first time, this translation includes a new introduction by historian Steve J. Stern, who analyzes the author’s achievement, why it matters, and the debates it sparked. For anyone interested in Peru and Latin America’s age of “dirty war,” or in the comparative study of revolutions, Maoism, and human rights, this book will provide arresting new insights.
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How Do I Know Thee?
Theatrical and Narrative Cognition in Seventeenth-Century France
Richard E. Goodkin
Northwestern University Press, 2015

The classical period in France presents a particularly lively battleground for the transition between oral-visual culture, on the one hand, and print culture on the other. The former depended on learning from sources of knowledge directly, in their presence, in a manner analogous to theatrical experience. The latter became characterized by the distance and abstraction of reading. How Do I Know Thee? explores the ways in which literature, philosophy, and psychology approach social cognition, or how we come to know others. Richard E. Goodkin describes a central opposition between what he calls “theatrical cognition” and “narrative cognition,” drawing both on scholarship on literary genre and mode, and also on the work of a number of philosophers and psychologists, in particular Descartes’s theory of cognition, Freudian psychoanalysis, mid‑twentieth‑century behaviorism, and the field of cognitive science. The result is a study that will be of interest not only to students of the classical period but also to those in the corresponding disciplines.
 

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How Do We Know What Information Sharing Is Really Worth? Exploring Methodologies to Measure the Value of Information Sharing and Fusion Efforts
Brian A. Jackson
RAND Corporation, 2014
The sharing of intelligence and law enforcement information is a central part of U.S. domestic security efforts, yet there are concerns about the effectiveness of information-sharing and fusion activities and their value relative to the public funds invested in them. This report lays out the challenges of evaluating information-sharing efforts that seek to achieve multiple goals simultaneously; reviews past evaluations of information-sharing programs; and lays out a path to improving the evaluation of such efforts.
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How Do We Look?
Resisting Visual Biopolitics
Fatimah Tobing Rony
Duke University Press, 2022
In How Do We Look? Fatimah Tobing Rony draws on transnational images of Indonesian women as a way to theorize what she calls visual biopolitics—the ways visual representation determines which lives are made to matter more than others. Rony outlines the mechanisms of visual biopolitics by examining Paul Gauguin’s 1893 portrait of Annah la Javanaise—a trafficked thirteen-year-old girl found wandering the streets of Paris—as well as US ethnographic and documentary films. In each instance, the figure of the Indonesian woman is inextricably tied to discourses of primitivism, savagery, colonialism, exoticism, and genocide. Rony also focuses on acts of resistance to visual biopolitics in film, writing, and photography. These works, such as Rachmi Diyah Larasati’s The Dance that Makes You Vanish, Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao (1995), and the collaborative films of Nia Dinata, challenge the naturalized methods of seeing that justify exploitation, dehumanization, and early death of people of color. By theorizing the mechanisms of visual biopolitics, Rony elucidates both its violence and its vulnerability.
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How Does A Policy Mean?
Interpreting Policy and Organizational Actions
Dvora Yanow
Georgetown University Press

This book offers a new, interpretive way of understanding organizations and policy by analyzing how they convey meaning through symbolic language, objects, and act. Yanow argues that contested facts in policy often reflect different policy meanings, which are often known tacitly and communicated through the symbols used by an implementing organization.

Yanow argues that policy and organizational actions are often as expressive of group or national identity as they are instrumentally oriented. Drawing on the Israel Corporation of Community Centers as an extended illustration of her arguments, she shows how policy meanings may be communicated to multiple audiences through the agency's actions. Using language, physical artifacts, and acts, Yanow explores how one vision of Israeli identity was communicated tacitly, at a time when Jewish Israeli "ethnicity" was publicly undiscussable. In reading public policies and administrative practices as ways in which a polity constructs and narrates its identity, Yanow shows how the case example raises questions of what it means to be a "good" Israeli.

Unlike most policy studies which consider organizations within a void, How Does a Policy Mean? puts policy in a societal context. Yanow's interpretation of the policy process extends beyond the field of public policy to examine the way organizations establish identity and image for themselves and for the wider public. Her analysis will be of value to those involved in political science, public administration, and organizational studies.

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How Does Analysis Cure?
Heinz Kohut
University of Chicago Press, 1984
The Austro-American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut was one of the foremost leaders in his field and developed the school of self-psychology, which sets aside the Freudian explanations for behavior and looks instead at self/object relationships and empathy in order to shed light on human behavior. In How Does Analysis Cure? Kohut presents the theoretical framework for self-psychology, and carefully lays out how the self develops over the course of time. Kohut also specifically defines healthy and unhealthy cases of Oedipal complexes and narcissism, while investigating the nature of analysis itself as treatment for pathologies. This in-depth examination of “the talking cure” explores the lesser studied phenomena of psychoanalysis, including when it is beneficial for analyses to be left unfinished, and the changing definition of “normal.”

An important work for working psychoanalysts, this book is important not only for psychologists, but also for anyone interested in the complex inner workings of the human psyche.
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How Does Germline Regenerate?
Kate MacCord
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A concise primer that complicates a convenient truth in biology—the divide between germ and somatic cells—with far-reaching ethical and public policy ramifications.
 
Scientists have long held that we have two kinds of cells—germ and soma. Make a change to germ cells—say using genome editing—and that change will appear in the cells of future generations. Somatic cells are “safe” after such tampering; modify your skin cells, and your future children’s skin cells will never know. And, while germ cells can give rise to new generations (including all of the somatic cells in a body), somatic cells can never become germ cells. How did scientists discover this relationship and distinction between somatic and germ cells—the so-called Weismann Barrier—and does it actually exist? Can somatic cells become germ cells in the way germ cells become somatic cells? That is, can germ cells regenerate from somatic cells even though conventional wisdom denies this possibility? Covering research from the late nineteenth century to the 2020s, historian and philosopher of science Kate MacCord explores how scientists came to understand and accept the dubious concept of the Weismann Barrier and what profound implications this convenient assumption has for research and policy, from genome editing to stem cell research, and much more.
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How Does Law Matter?
Fundamental Issues in Law And Society
Bryant G. Garth and Austin Sarat
Northwestern University Press, 1998
The question of how law matters has long been fundamental to the law and society field. Social science scholarship has repeatedly demonstrated that law matters less, or differently, than those who study only legal doctrine would have us believe. Yet research in this field depends on a belief in the relevance of law, no matter how often gaps are identified.

These essays show how law is relevant in both an "instrumental" and a "constitutive" sense, as a tool to accomplish particular purposes and as an important force in shaping the everyday worlds in which we live. Essays examine these issues by focusing on legal consciousness, the body, discrimination, and colonialism as well as on more traditional legal concerns such as juries and criminal justice.
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How Does Social Science Work?
Reflections on Practice
Paul Diesing
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992

The culmination of a lifetime spent in a variety of fields - sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, and philosophy of science - -How Does Social Science Work? takes an innovative, sometimes iconoclastic look at social scientists at work in many disciplines.  It describes how they investigate and the kinds of truth they produce, illuminating the weaknesses and dangers inherent in their research.

At once an analysis, a critique, and a synthesis, this major study begins by surveying philosophical approaches to hermeneutics, to examine the question of how social science ought to work.  It illustrates many of its arguments with untraditional examples, such as the reception of the work of the political biographer Robert Caro to show the hermeneutical problems of ethnographers.  The major part of the book surveys sociological, political, and psychological studies of social science to get a rounded picture of how social science works,

Paul Diesling warns that “social science exists between two opposite kinds of degeneration, a value-free professionalism that lives only for publications that show off the latest techniques, and a deep social concern that uses science for propaganda.”  He argues for greater self-awareness and humility among social scientists, although he notes that “some social scientists . . . will angrily reject the thought that their personality affects their research in any way.”

This profound and sometimes witty book will appeal to students and practitioners in the social sciences who are ready to take a fresh look at their field.  An extensive bibliography provides a wealth of references across an array of social science disciplines.

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How Dogs Work
Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein
University of Chicago Press, 2015
How well do we really know dogs?  People may enjoy thinking about them as “man’s best friend,” but what actually drives the things they do? What is going on in their fur-covered heads as they look at us with their big, expressive eyes?  Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein know something about these questions, and with How Dogs Work, they’re ready to share; this is their guide to understanding your dog and its behavior.
 
Approaching dogs as a biological species rather than just as pets, Coppinger and Feinstein accessibly synthesize decades of research and field experiments to explain the evolutionary foundations underlying dog behaviors. They examine the central importance of the shape of dogs:  how their physical body (including the genes and the brain) affects behavior, how shape interacts with the environment as animals grow, and how all of this has developed over time. Shape, they tell us, is what makes a champion sled dog or a Border collie that can successfully herd sheep. Other chapters in How Dogs Work explore such mysteries as why dogs play; whether dogs have minds, and if so what kinds of things they might know; why dogs bark; how dogs feed and forage; and the influence of the early relationship between mother and pup. Going far beyond the cozy lap dog, Coppinger and Feinstein are equally fascinated by what we can learn from the adaptations of dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, dingoes, and even pumas in the wild, as well as the behavior of working animals like guarding and herding dogs.
 
We cherish dogs as family members and deeply value our lengthy companionship with them. But, isn’t it time we knew more about who Fido and Trixie really are? How Dogs Work will provide some keys to unlocking the origins of many of our dogs' most common, most puzzling, and most endearing behaviors.
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How Dutch Americans Stayed Dutch
Michael J. Douma
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
This study explores Dutch identity in the United States, demonstrating how over time Dutch Americans have remained persistently present as a distinct group, yet at the same time have represented a wide range of perspectives on “Dutchness” itself. Exploring the long history of Dutch identity, Michael J. Douma argues that the very flexibility of the concept of Dutchness has enabled this ethnic group to evolve to meet changing circumstances even as it has allowed Dutch Americans to retain a sense of themselves as fundamentally Dutch.
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How Economics Became a Mathematical Science
E. Roy Weintraub
Duke University Press, 2002
In How Economics Became a Mathematical Science E. Roy Weintraub traces the history of economics through the prism of the history of mathematics in the twentieth century. As mathematics has evolved, so has the image of mathematics, explains Weintraub, such as ideas about the standards for accepting proof, the meaning of rigor, and the nature of the mathematical enterprise itself. He also shows how economics itself has been shaped by economists’ changing images of mathematics.
Whereas others have viewed economics as autonomous, Weintraub presents a different picture, one in which changes in mathematics—both within the body of knowledge that constitutes mathematics and in how it is thought of as a discipline and as a type of knowledge—have been intertwined with the evolution of economic thought. Weintraub begins his account with Cambridge University, the intellectual birthplace of modern economics, and examines specifically Alfred Marshall and the Mathematical Tripos examinations—tests in mathematics that were required of all who wished to study economics at Cambridge. He proceeds to interrogate the idea of a rigorous mathematical economics through the connections between particular mathematical economists and mathematicians in each of the decades of the first half of the twentieth century, and thus describes how the mathematical issues of formalism and axiomatization have shaped economics. Finally, How Economics Became a Mathematical Science reconstructs the career of the economist Sidney Weintraub, whose relationship to mathematics is viewed through his relationships with his mathematician brother, Hal, and his mathematician-economist son, the book’s author.
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How Economics Shapes Science
Paula Stephan
Harvard University Press, 2015

The beauty of science may be pure and eternal, but the practice of science costs money. And scientists, being human, respond to incentives and costs, in money and glory. Choosing a research topic, deciding what papers to write and where to publish them, sticking with a familiar area or going into something new—the payoff may be tenure or a job at a highly ranked university or a prestigious award or a bump in salary. The risk may be not getting any of that.

At a time when science is seen as an engine of economic growth, Paula Stephan brings a keen understanding of the ongoing cost-benefit calculations made by individuals and institutions as they compete for resources and reputation. She shows how universities offload risks by increasing the percentage of non-tenure-track faculty, requiring tenured faculty to pay salaries from outside grants, and staffing labs with foreign workers on temporary visas. With funding tight, investigators pursue safe projects rather than less fundable ones with uncertain but potentially path-breaking outcomes. Career prospects in science are increasingly dismal for the young because of ever-lengthening apprenticeships, scarcity of permanent academic positions, and the difficulty of getting funded.

Vivid, thorough, and bold, How Economics Shapes Science highlights the growing gap between the haves and have-nots—especially the vast imbalance between the biomedical sciences and physics/engineering—and offers a persuasive vision of a more productive, more creative research system that would lead and benefit the world.

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How Effective Is Correctional Education, and Where Do We Go from Here? The Results of a Comprehensive Evaluation
Lois M. Davis
RAND Corporation, 2014
This report assesses the effectiveness of correctional education programs for both incarcerated adults and juveniles and the cost-effectiveness of adult correctional education. It also provides results of a survey of U.S. state correctional education directors that give an up-to-date picture of what correctional education looks like today. Finally, the authors offer recommendations for improving the field of correctional education moving forward.
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How Emotions Work
Jack Katz
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Many of the ways in which we express and react to emotions make very little sense. From the tears that mark both the best and worst moments in our lives to the rages sparked by the most trivial of traffic annoyances, emotions surprise us-they lead us to act in ways contrary to our better judgment, and they always seem to lie just beyond our control. In How Emotions Work, Jack Katz observes situations ranging from a criminal's interrogation-room breakdown to a child's temper tantrum, and offers new approaches to understanding our emotions, their sources, and the behavior they lead to, all with unprecedented clarity.
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How Experiments End
Peter Galison
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"Galison provides excellent histories of three experimental episodes: the measurement of the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron, the discovery of the mu meson, or muon, and the discovery of weak neutral currents. These studies of actual experiments will provide valuable material for both philosophers and historians of science and Galison's own thoughts on the nature of experiment are extremely important. . . . Galison has given both philosophers and historians much to think about. I strongly urge you to read this book."—Allan Franklin, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science

"Anyone who is seriously concerned with understanding how research is done should read this. There have been many books on one or another part of its subject matter but few giving such insights into how the research is done and how the consensus of discovery is arrived at."—Frank Close, New Scientist

"[Galison] is to be congratulated on producing a masterpiece in the field."—Michael Redhead, Synthese

"How Experiments End is a major historical work on an exciting topic."—Andy Pickering, Isis
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How Fast Can A Falcon Dive?
Fascinating Answers to Questions about Birds of Prey
Capainolo, Peter
Rutgers University Press, 2010
How Fast Can a Falcon Dive? explores the world of raptors in a way that will appeal to bird lovers and biology enthusiasts alike. This colorful volume is complete with more than fifty-five color and black and white images from photographers and artists around the world. In a reader friendly question and answer format, ornithologist Peter Capainolo and science writer Carol A. Butler define and classify raptors, explore the physical attributes of birds of prey, view how their bodies work, and explain the social and physical behaviors of these species-how they communicate, hunt, reproduce, and more. Capainolo, who received one of the first falconry licenses issued in New York state at age eighteen, relates his personal experience in falconry to describe raptor training and husbandry where the human-bird interactions are complex.

From stories of red-tailed hawks making their homes on the ledges of Manhattan skyscrapers to their role in protecting California's vineyards from flocks of grape-loving starlings, How Fast Can a Falcon Dive? explores how these avian predators interact with people and with their environment.
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How Fat Works
Philip A. Wood
Harvard University Press, 2006
An experimental pathologist and molecular geneticist, Philip Wood uses gene-knockout technology to study the way mouse genes regulate the metabolism of fat—research that provides insights into the workings of fatty-acid metabolism in humans and what can happen when that metabolic balance goes awry. Based on the classes he regularly teaches to first- and second-year medical students, Wood's book reviews the individual and public health burden of obesity and clarifies often-used, but often inadequately explained, terms employed in the continuing cultural and scientific debate about excess fat. He explains the role of fat in the healthy body, how fat is made, stored, and burned, and demonstrates how excess fat can lead to an array of metabolic disorders and diseases, from hypercholesterolemia and insulin resistance to diabetes. He reviews what recent research can tell us about specific genes or groups of genes that can lead to specific metabolic disorders. He explains the science behind common weight-loss regimens and why those regimens might succeed or fail, and reviews the complex interplay of hormones, genes, and stress in the way our bodies deal with fat through the life cycle. How Fat Works is a concise, clear, and up-to-date primer on the workings of fat, and essential reading for professionals entering careers in medicine and public health administration or anyone wanting a better understanding of one of our most urgent health crises.
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How Fathers Care for the Next Generation
A Four-Decade Study
John Snarey
Harvard University Press, 1993

Even in this age of working mothers, the role of fathering is often overlooked. This book illuminates the realities of fathering by presenting the results of a unique empirical study conducted over four decades and covering four generations of fathers and children. Through case studies and data analysis, John Snarey demonstrates that men's care for their families reaps immense and long-lasting benefits—for themselves, for their offspring, and for future generations.

In striking contrast to research that considers fathers to be obscure or peripheral figures, Snarey reveals their position as central caregivers and characterizes their most effective nurturing behaviors. He examines fathers' involvement in three vital realms of their children's development: social-emotional, intellectual-academic, and physical-athletic. Looking specifically at fathers' relationships with their oldest children during the first two decades of their lives, Snarey addresses issues of fathering in both childhood and adolescence. He presents portraits of individual father-son and father-daughter relationships, and measures and defines the ways in which “good” fathers are constructively engaged in and supportive of children's growth. Snarey also focuses on the fathers themselves. Moving back in time, he explores how men's boyhood experiences with their own fathers affect their subsequent parenting styles. Then, cycling forward, he observes how various fathering experiences affect men at mid-life, in their marriages, and throughout their careers. His study also considers how the threat of infertility impacts fathers' generativity—their ability to care for the next generation.

Within the current wave of scholarly interest in fathering, this is the first comprehensive longitudinal study of the topic. It is firmly grounded in Erik H. Erikson's model of psychosocial generativity, and adds a significant dimension to Erikson's theory by successfully applying it to empirical research. Snarey makes a major contribution to male, child, family, and developmental psychology, and addresses issues of ongoing concern in the fields of sociology and education. How Fathers Care for the Next Generation offers hope that men can, indeed, rework their past and provide better fathering than they themselves received.

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How Film Histories Were Made
Materials, Methods, Discourses
Malte Hagener
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
This book is specifically dedicated to film history’s own history: It provides insights into the fabrication of film histories and the discourses on their materials and methods in the past in order to better understand and reconsider film history today. The interventions unpack unspoken assumptions and hidden agendas that determine film historiography until today, also with the aim to act as a critical reflection on the potential future orientation of the field. The edited volume proposes a transnational, entangled and culturally diverse approach towards an archaeology of film history, while paying specific attention to persons, objects, infrastructures, regions, institutional fields and events hitherto overlooked. It explores past and ongoing processes of doing, undoing and redoing film history. Thereby, in a self-reflective gesture, it also draws attention to our own work as film historians.
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How Fire Runs
A Novel
Charles Dodd White
Ohio University Press, 2020

A chilling, timely reminder of the moral and human costs of racial hatred.

What happens when a delusional white supremacist and his army of followers decide to create a racially pure “Little Europe” within a rural Tennessee community? As the town’s residents grapple with their new reality, minor skirmishes escalate and dirty politics, scandals, and a cataclysmic chain of violence follows. In this uncanny reflection of our time, award-winning novelist Charles Dodd White asks whether Americans can save themselves from their worst impulses and considers the consequences when this salvation comes too late.

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How Free Can Religion Be?
Randall P. Bezanson
University of Illinois Press, 2010

In tracking the evolution of the First Amendment's Free Exercise and Establishment Clause doctrine through Key Supreme Court decisions on religious freedom, legal scholar Randall P. Bezanson focuses on the court's shift from strict separation of church and state to a position where the government accommodates and even fosters religion. Beginning with samples from the latter half of the nineteenth century, the detailed case studies present new problems and revisit old ones as well: the purported belief of polygamy in the Mormon Church; state support for religious schools; the teaching of evolution and creationism in public schools; Amish claims for exemption from compulsory education laws; comparable claims for Native American religion in relation to drug laws; and rights of free speech and equal access by religious groups in colleges and public schools.

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How Free Can the Press Be?
Randall P. Bezanson
University of Illinois Press, 2003
Randall P. Bezanson explores the contradictions embedded in understanding press freedom in America by discussing nine of the most pivotal and provocative First Amendment cases in US judicial history. Each case resulted in a ruling that refined or reshaped judicial definition of the limits of press freedom.

The cases concerned matters ranging from The New York Times's publication of the Pentagon Papers to Hugo Zacchini's claim that TV broadcasts of his human cannonball act threatened his livelihood. Bezanson also examines the case of politician blackballed by the Miami Herald; the Pittsburgh Press's argument that it had the right to use gender based column headings in its classifieds; and a crime victim suing the Des Moines Register over the paper's publication of intimate details, including the victim's name.

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How Free Is Free?
The Long Death of Jim Crow
Leon F. Litwack
Harvard University Press, 2009

In 1985, a black veteran of the civil rights movement offered a bleak vision of a long and troubled struggle. For more than a century, black southerners learned to live with betrayed expectations, diminishing prospects, and devastated aspirations. Their odyssey includes some of the most appalling examples of terrorism, violence, and dehumanization in the history of this nation. But, as Leon Litwack graphically demonstrates, it is at the same time an odyssey of resilience and resistance defined by day-to-day acts of protest: the fight for justice poignantly recorded in the stories, songs, images, and movements of a people trying to be heard.

For black men and women, the question is: how free is free? Despite two major efforts to reconstruct race relations, injustices remain. From the height of Jim Crow to the early twenty-first century, struggles over racism persist despite court decisions and legislation. Few indignities were more pronounced than the World War II denial of basic rights and privileges to those responding to the call to make the world safe for democratic values—values that they themselves did not enjoy. And even the civil rights movement promise to redeem America was frustrated by change that was often more symbolic than real.

Although a painful history to confront, Litwack’s book inspires as it probes the enduring story of racial inequality and the ongoing fight for freedom in black America with power and grace.

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How Girls Achieve
Sally A. Nuamah
Harvard University Press, 2019

Winner of the Jackie Kirk Award
Winner of the AESA Critics’ Choice Award


“Blazes new trails in the study of the lives of girls, challenging all of us who care about justice and gender equity not only to create just and inclusive educational institutions but to be unapologetically feminist in doing so. Seamlessly merging research with the stories and voices of girls and those who educate them, this book reminds us that we should do better and inspires the belief that we can. It is the blueprint we’ve been waiting for.”
—Brittney C. Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage


“Nuamah makes a compelling and convincing case for the development of the type of school that can not only teach girls but also transform them…An essential read for all educators, policymakers, and parents invested in a better future.”
—Joyce Banda, former President of the Republic of Malawi


This bold and necessary book points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender.

Educated women raise healthier families, build stronger communities, and generate economic opportunities for themselves and their children. Yet millions of disadvantaged girls never make it to school—and too many others drop out or fail. Upending decades of advice and billions of dollars in aid, Nuamah argues that this happens because so many challenges girls confront—from sexual abuse to unequal access to materials and opportunities—go unaddressed. But it isn’t enough just to go to school. What you learn there has to prepare you for the world where you’ll put that knowledge to work.

A compelling and inspiring scholar who has founded a nonprofit to test her ideas, Nuamah reveals that developing resilience is not a gender-neutral undertaking. Preaching grit doesn’t help girls; it actively harms them. Drawing on her deep immersion in classrooms in the United States, Ghana, and South Africa, Nuamah calls for a new approach: creating feminist schools that will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms, and allow them to carve out their own paths to success.

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How Governments Privatize
The Politics of Divestment in the United States and Germany
Mark Cassell
Georgetown University Press

Governments throughout the world confront enormous challenges when divesting. Whether it is poor-performing bank loans in Japan and Korea, military bases in the United States, or real estate in eastern Europe, the challenge of public divestment is more than just a question of how to map a path to economic efficiency. Conventional wisdom in public management and privatization literature says that the execution of such enormous tasks as divestment is typically done poorly, and that the government strategy is likely to be inefficient.

Mark Cassell argues that privatization must be understood as a political and administrative puzzle rather than simply an exercise in economic efficiency. This study of two successful divestment agencies — the U.S. Resolution Trust Corporation and the German Treuhandanstalt — presents a complex understanding of the two agencies' performance in privatizing hundreds of billions of dollars of assets following two very different crises, the savings and loan debacle in the United States and unification in Germany. In the U.S., the worst economic problem since the Great Depression forced the government to recreate and reshape private property on an immense scale. In Germany, melding East and West Germany involved converting an entire national economy that employed more than four million people. In each case, unassuming public agencies handled two of the largest public sales of assets in this century.

Cassell identifies the importance and effects of managerial structures and of national institutions — legislatures and executives — on the outcomes of the reform efforts.

This book will be of interest to those interested in alternatives to traditional public-sector structures, electoral connections to bureaucracies, comparative political economy, and the historic events of the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis and German unification. It is crucial reading for policy and public administration practitioners and scholars alike.

[more]

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How Green Became Good
Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens
Hillary Angelo
University of Chicago Press, 2021
As projects like Manhattan’s High Line, Chicago’s 606, China’s eco-cities, and Ethiopia’s tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany’s Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was “greened” with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley's urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts. 
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How Green Were the Nazis?
Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich
Franz-Josef Brüggemeier
Ohio University Press, 2005
The Nazis created nature preserves, contemplated sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature. How Green Were the Nazis? is the first book to examine the ideology and practice of environmental protection in Nazi Germany.

Environmentalists and conservationists in Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazi regime with open arms, for the most part, and hoped that it would bring about legal and institutional changes. However, environmentalists soon realized that the rhetorical attention that they received from the regime did not always translate into action. By the late 1930s, nature and the environment became less pressing concerns as Nazi Germany prepared and executed its extensive war.

Based on prodigious archival research, and written by some of the most important scholars in the field of twentieth-century German history, How Green Were the Nazis? illuminates the ideological overlap between Nazi ideas and conservationist agendas. Moreover, this landmark book underscores that the “green” policies of the Nazis were more than a mere episode or aberration in environmental history.((BLURB))---"The environmental ideas, policies, and consequences of the Nazi regime pose controversial questions that have long begged for authoritative answers. At last, a team of highly qualified scholars has tackled these questions, with dispassionate judgment and deep research. Their assessment will stand for years to come as the fundamental work on the subject—and provides a new angle of vision on 20th-century Europe's most disruptive force."—John McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World---EDITORS---Franz-Josef Brueggemeier is a professor of history at the university of Freiburg, Germany. He has published extensively in the field of environmental history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.Mark Cioc is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and editor of the journal Environmental History. He is the author of The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000. Thomas Zeller is an assistant professor in the department of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Straße, Bahn, Panorama, translated as Driving Germany.
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How Happy to Call Oneself a Turk
Provincial Newspapers and the Negotiation of a Muslim National Identity
By Gavin D. Brockett
University of Texas Press, 2011

The modern nation-state of Turkey was established in 1923, but when and how did its citizens begin to identify themselves as Turks? Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey's founding president, is almost universally credited with creating a Turkish national identity through his revolutionary program to "secularize" the former heartland of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, despite Turkey's status as the lone secular state in the Muslim Middle East, religion remains a powerful force in Turkish society, and the country today is governed by a democratically elected political party with a distinctly religious (Islamist) orientation.

In this history, Gavin D. Brockett takes a fresh look at the formation of Turkish national identity, focusing on the relationship between Islam and nationalism and the process through which a "religious national identity" emerged. Challenging the orthodoxy that Atatürk and the political elite imposed a sense of national identity from the top down, Brockett examines the social and political debates in provincial newspapers from around the country. He shows that the unprecedented expansion of print media in Turkey between 1945 and 1954, which followed the end of strict, single-party authoritarian government, created a forum in which ordinary people could inject popular religious identities into the new Turkish nationalism. Brockett makes a convincing case that it was this fruitful negotiation between secular nationalism and Islam—rather than the imposition of secularism alone—that created the modern Turkish national identity.

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How Healthy Are We?
A National Study of Well-Being at Midlife
Edited by Orville Gilbert Brim, Carol D. Ryff, and Ronald C. Kessler
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Childhood, adolescence, even the "twilight years" have been extensively researched and documented. But the vast terrain known as midlife—the longest segment of the life course—has remained uncharted. How physically and psychologically healthy are Americans at midlife? And why do some experience greater well-being than others?

The MacArthur Foundation addressed these questions head-on by funding a landmark study known as "Midlife in the U.S.," or MIDUS. For the first time in a single study, researchers were able to integrate epidemiological, sociological, and psychological assessments, as well as innovative new measures to evaluate how work and family life influence each other.

How Healthy Are We? presents the key findings from the survey in three sections: physical health, quality of life and psychological well-being, and the contexts (family, work) of the midlife. The topics covered by almost forty scholars in a wide variety of fields are vast, including everything from how health and well-being vary with socioeconomic standing, gender, race, or region of the country to how middle-aged people differ from younger or older adults in their emotional experience and quality of life. This health—the study measures not only health-the absence of illness—but also reports on the presence of wellness in middle-aged Americans.

The culmination of a decade and a half of research by leading scholars, How Healthy Are We? will dramatically alter the way we think about health in middle age and the factors that influence it. Researchers, policymakers, and others concerned about the quality of midlife in contemporary America will welcome its insights.

* Having a good life means having good relationships with others to almost 70% of those surveyed. Less than 40% mentioned their careers.

* Reports of disruptive daily stressors vary by age, with young adults and those in midlife experiencing more than those in later adulthood.

* Men have higher assessments of their physical and mental health than woman until the age of 60.
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How Holocausts Happen
The United States in Central America
Douglas V. Porpora
Temple University Press, 1992

"History repeats itself, but it never repeats itself exactly," observes Douglas Porpora in this powerful indictment of U.S. intervention in Central America. Comparing the general public’s reaction to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany with American public opinion of U.S. participation in the genocidal policies of Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary forces, and the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador among others, Porpora demonstrates that moral indifference to the suffering of others was the common response. With reference to Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil, he develops the concept of a "Holocaust-like event" and examines how even a democratic society can be capable of something on the order of a Holocaust.

Unlike other accounts of the Holocaust and genocide, this book focuses on the citizenry served or ruled by genocidal governments rather than on the governments themselves. Porpora argues that moral indifference and lack of interest in critical reflection are key factors that enable Holocaust-like events to happen And he characterizes American society as being typically indifferent to the fate of other people, uninformed, and anti-intellectual.

Porpora cites numerous horrifying examples of U.S.-backed Latin American government actions against their own peasants, Indians, and dissident factions. He offers finally a theory of public moral indifference and argues that although such indifference is socially created by government, the media, churches, and other institutions, we, the public, must ultimately take responsibility for it. How Holocausts Happen is at once a scholarly examination of the nature of genocide and a stinging indictment of American society.

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How Humans Cooperate
Confronting the Challenges of Collective Action
Richard E. Blanton
University Press of Colorado, 2016

In How Humans Cooperate, Richard E. Blanton and Lane F. Fargher take a new approach to investigating human cooperation, developed from the vantage point of an "anthropological imagination." Drawing on the discipline’s broad and holistic understanding of humans in biological, social, and cultural dimensions and across a wide range of temporal and cultural variation, the authors unite psychological and institutional approaches by demonstrating the interplay of institution building and cognitive abilities of the human brain.

Blanton and Fargher develop an approach that is strongly empirical, historically deep, and more synthetic than other research designs, using findings from fields as diverse as neurobiology, primatology, ethnography, history, art history, and archaeology. While much current research on collective action pertains to local-scale cooperation, How Humans Cooperate puts existing theories to the test at larger scales in markets, states, and cities throughout the Old and New Worlds.

This innovative book extends collective action theory beyond Western history and into a broadly cross-cultural dimension, places cooperation in the context of large and complex human societies, and demonstrates the interplay of collective action and aspects of human cognitive ability. By extending the scope and content of collective action theory, the authors find a fruitful new path to understanding human cooperation.

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How Humans Learn
The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching
Joshua R. Eyler
West Virginia University Press, 2018

Even on good days, teaching is a challenging profession. One way to make the job of college instructors easier, however, is to know more about the ways students learn. How Humans Learn aims to do just that by peering behind the curtain and surveying research in fields as diverse as developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insight into the science behind learning.

The result is a story that ranges from investigations of the evolutionary record to studies of infants discovering the world for the first time, and from a look into how our brains respond to fear to a reckoning with the importance of gestures and language. Joshua R. Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry—curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure—devoting a chapter to each and providing practical takeaways for busy teachers. He also interviews and observes college instructors across the country, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience.

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How I Beat Coca-Cola and Other Tales of One-Upmanship
Carl Djerassi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
Carl Djerassi crafts a shrewd collection of comedies of manners, exposing the foibles of elite tribes—business executives, chefs, scientists, professors, musicians, and other clever characters. They spar in battles of one-upmanship using class, education, gender, or prestige as their weapons, sometimes leaving damaged bystanders in their wake but sometimes finding their superiority deflated by unexpected turns of events.
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How I Became the Kind of Writer I Became
An Experiment in Autoethnography
Charles Bazerman
University Press of Colorado, 2024
In his exploration of his development as one of the most prolific and thoughtful writers in the field of writing studies, Charles Bazerman considers how, like all writers, he has been shaped in distinctive and unique ways by his literate experiences. “Each of our stories is particular,” he writes, calling this book “my experiment in saying what I can from my perspective about my development as a writer.” How I Became the Kind of Writer I Became poses questions about the lifespan development of writing and, in particular, how writing emerges within the “conditions, relations, and needs of life.” Observing that his autoethnography does not offer a norm or an ideal, Bazerman calls attention to the need for more of these kinds of reflections. “We need many such stories from many kinds of writers,” he notes, “reflecting on what opportunities, needs, experiences, and resources came their way and how they iteratively solved the problem of what to write and how to write it, as they saw it.” As the first book in the Lifespan Writing Research book series, Bazerman’s work serves as both a model for reflective inquiry and a call for additional work in this area.
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How I Escaped from Gilligan's Island
And Other Misadventures of a Hollywood Writer-Producer
William Froug
University of Wisconsin Press

    In the early 1950s writers were leaving radio en masse to try their hand at another promising medium—television. William Froug was in the thick of that exodus, a young man full of ideas in a Hollywood bursting with opportunities. In his forty-year career Froug would write and/or produce many of the shows that America has grown up with. From the drama of Playhouse 90 and the mind-bending premises of The Twilight Zone to the escapist scenarios of Adventures in Paradise, Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, and Charlie’s Angels, Froug played a role in shaping his trade. He crossed paths with some of the memorable personalities in the industry, including Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Agnes Moorehead, Elizabeth Montgomery, Robert Blake, Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Aaron Spelling, and Sherwood Schwartz.

    Froug reveals a post-WWII America giddy with the success of its newest medium—yet sobered at moments by strikes and union politics, McCarthyism and anti-Semitism. It was a world of hastily written scripts, sudden firings, thwarted creativity, and fickle tastes. And yet, while clearly exasperated with many aspects of Hollywood, Froug was a man utterly in his element, his frustration with the industry ultimately eclipsed by his dedication to his craft.

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How I Got Cultured
A Nevada Memoir
Phyllis Barber
University of Nevada Press, 1994
Phyllis Barber grew up in Las Vegas, in the midst of a devout Mormon family. As a small child, she began to feel uneasy with her faith's all-pervasive certainty and righteousness. As she grew, the tensions between her religious beliefs and her desire for a larger, more cultured life also grew. She studied piano and dance, performed with a high school precision dance team, worked as an accompanist in a ballet studio and as a model.

How I Got Cultured is a moving, candid, and sometimes hilarious account of an American adolescence, negotiated between the strictures of a demanding faith and the allures of one of the most flamboyant cities in the world.

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How I Got Him Back
A Novel
Valerie Sayers
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Mary Faith Rapple wonders when her lover will stop making promise he can’t keep—and leave his wife at last. But Mary Faith isn’t the only woman in town with man troubles, for everyone has someone they want, someone they can’t have, and someone they want to forget. Sayers has a gift for voice and the honest, gritty commentary about human behavior. This book offers her own version of the humor that Southern writers from Eudora Welty to Flannery O’Connor to Reynolds Price use so tellingly. Sayers’ novel is a skillful and well-crafted book which should appeal to readers of intelligent fiction.
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How I Got Over
Clara Ward and the World-Famous Ward Singers
Willa Ward-Royster
Temple University Press, 2000
Lavishly illustrated with photographs from the author's collection, this book chronicles the world-famous Ward Singers' story from rural Anderson, South Carolina, to the streets of North Philadelphia and beyond. Told by Clara Ward's older sister, Willa, with the assistance of musician and writer Toni Rose, the Wards' story ranges over the joys and frustrations, triumphs and agonies of what it means to be simultaneously a family, an entertainment business enterprise, and a group with a mission to spread God's word.
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How I Married Michele
and Other Journeys, Essays
Gary Gildner
BkMk Press, 2021
In these fifteen personal essays, Gary Gildner comes of age at a Catholic school learning Latin, how the girls crossed their legs in algebra, and football in the school’s bomb shelter by exchanging punches with his best friend. He goes to Communist Poland to teach American literature and, in medias res, teaches the Warsaw Sparks baseball team how to win. Living in Czechoslovakia when that country is splitting in half, he learns the meaning of “Where the Dog is Buried” and fathers a daughter. Gildner writes about his Polish-German family’s immigrant story and his friendships with poet Richard Hugo and Raymond Andrews, his college roommate and the author of Baby Sweet’s and other African American novels. He writes about 9/11, stealing, meeting a cougar up close, meeting Michele, felling his barn in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains with a crowbar, and boxing with Chuck Davey, a fellow Michigan State Spartan and one-time challenger for the World Welterweight title.
 
Essays from this collection have appeared in such venues as the New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, and New Letters.
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How I Would Help the World
HELEN KELLER
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2011

Swedenborg’s books are an inexhaustible well-spring of satisfaction to those who live the life of the mind. I plunge my hands into my large Braille volumes containing his teachings, and withdraw them full of the secrets of the spiritual world.

— Helen Keller, How I Would Help the World

This essay by Helen Keller expresses her deep gratitude to Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish seer, who had a profound influence on her spiritual life. In it she talks about the importance of love and truth in a world filled with materialism and selfishness, and the joy that comes from true understanding.

Her great advice on how she would help the world is to have people read Swedenborg’s writings and thereby overcome the many problems of the human condition. She states, “It would be such a joy to me if I might be the instrument of bringing Swedenborg to a world that is spiritually deaf and blind.” She further states that reading Swedenborg and understanding his words “has been my strongest incitement to overcome limitations.”

Her words are interwoven with photographs of her life and quotes from Swedenborg on spiritual topics. This book will be a treasure for readers who already know and respect Helen Keller and an inspiration for those who do not.

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How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands
Susan Eva Eckstein and Adil Najam, eds.
Duke University Press, 2013
How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands examines the range of economic, social, and cultural impacts immigrants have had, both knowingly and unknowingly, in their home countries. The book opens with overviews of the ways migrants become agents of homeland development. The essays that follow focus on the varied impacts immigrants have had in China, India, Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines, Mozambique, and Turkey. One contributor examines the role Indians who worked in Silicon Valley played in shaping the structure, successes, and continued evolution of India's IT industry. Another traces how Salvadoran immigrants extend U.S. gangs and their brutal violence to El Salvador and neighboring countries. The tragic situation in Mozambique of economically desperate émigrés who travel to South Africa to work, contract HIV while there, and infect their wives upon their return is the subject of another essay. Taken together, the essays show the multiple ways countries are affected by immigration. Understanding these effects will provide a foundation for future policy reforms in ways that will strengthen the positive and minimize the negative effects of the current mobile world.

Contributors. Victor Agadjanian, Boaventura Cau, José Miguel Cruz, Susan Eva Eckstein, Kyle Eischen, David Scott FitzGerald, Natasha Iskander, Riva Kastoryano, Cecilia Menjívar, Adil Najam, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Alejandro Portes, Min Ye

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How “Indians” Think
Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory
Gonzalo Lamana
University of Arizona Press, 2019
The conquest and colonization of the Americas marked the beginning of a social, economic, and cultural change of global scale. Most of what we know about how colonial actors understood and theorized this complex historical transformation comes from Spanish sources. This makes the few texts penned by Indigenous intellectuals in colonial times so important: they allow us to see how some of those who inhabited the colonial world in a disadvantaged position thought and felt about it.
 
This book shines light on Indigenous perspectives through a novel interpretation of the works of the two most important Amerindian intellectuals in the Andes, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca. Building on but also departing from the predominant scholarly position that views Indigenous-Spanish relations as the clash of two distinct cultures, Gonzalo Lamana argues that Guaman Poma and Garcilaso were the first Indigenous activist intellectuals and that they developed post-racial imaginaries four hundred years ago. Their texts not only highlighted Native peoples’ achievements, denounced injustice, and demanded colonial reform, but they also exposed the emerging Spanish thinking and feeling on race that was at the core of colonial forms of discrimination. These authors aimed to alter the way colonial actors saw each other and, as a result, to change the world in which they lived.
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How Infants Know Minds
Vasudevi Reddy
Harvard University Press, 2008

Most psychologists claim that we begin to develop a “theory of mind”—some basic ideas about other people’s minds—at age two or three, by inference, deduction, and logical reasoning.

But does this mean that small babies are unaware of minds? That they see other people simply as another (rather dynamic and noisy) kind of object? This is a common view in developmental psychology. Yet, as this book explains, there is compelling evidence that babies in the first year of life can tease, pretend, feel self-conscious, and joke with people. Using observations from infants’ everyday interactions with their families, Vasudevi Reddy argues that such early emotional engagements show infants’ growing awareness of other people’s attention, expectations, and intentions.

Reddy deals with the persistent problem of “other minds” by proposing a “second-person” solution: we know other minds if we can respond to them. And we respond most richly in engagement with them. She challenges psychology’s traditional “detached” stance toward understanding people, arguing that the most fundamental way of knowing minds—both for babies and for adults—is through engagement with them. According to this argument the starting point for understanding other minds is not isolation and ignorance but emotional relation.

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How Informal Institutions Matter
Evidence from Turkish Social and Political Spheres
Zeki Sarigil
University of Michigan Press, 2023

In How Informal Institutions Matter, Zeki Sarigil examines the role of informal institutions in sociopolitical life and addresses the following questions: Why and how do informal institutions emerge? To ask this differently, why do agents still create or resort to informal institutions despite the presence of formal institutional rules and regulations? How do informal institutions matter? What roles do they play in sociopolitical life? How can we classify informal institutions? What novel types of informal institutions can we identify and explain? How do informal institutions interact with formal institutions? How do they shape formal institutional rules, mechanisms, and outcomes? Finally, how do existing informal institutions change? What factors might trigger informal institutional change? In order to answer these questions, Sarigil examines several empirical cases of informal institution as derived from various issue areas in the Turkish sociopolitical context (i.e., civil law, conflict resolution, minority rights, and local governance) and from multiple levels (i.e., national and local).

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How Information Matters
Networks and Public Policy Innovation
Kathleen Hale
Georgetown University Press, 2011

How Information Matters examines the ways a network of state and local governments and nonprofit organizations can enhance the capacity for successful policy change by public administrators. Hale examines drug courts, programs that typify the highly networked, collaborative environment of public administrators today. These “special dockets” implement justice but also drug treatment, case management, drug testing, and incentive programs for non-violent offenders in lieu of jail time. In a study that spans more than two decades, Hale shows ways organizations within the network act to champion, challenge, and support policy innovations over time. Her description of interactions between courts, administrative agencies, and national organizations highlight the evolution of collaborative governance in the state and local arena, with vignettes that share specific experiences across six states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, and Tennessee) and ways that they acquired knowledge from the network to make decisions.

How Information Matters offers valuable insight into successful ways for collaboration and capacity building. It will be of special interest to public administrators or policymakers who wish to identify ways to improve their own programs’ performance.

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How It Is
The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova
V. F. Cordova; Edited by Kathleen Dean Moore, Kurt Peters, Ted Jojola, and Amber Lacy, with a Foreword by Linda Hogan
University of Arizona Press, 2007
Viola Cordova was the first Native American woman to receive a PhD in philosophy. Even as she became an expert on canonical works of traditional Western philosophy, she devoted herself to defining a Native American philosophy. Although she passed away before she could complete her life’s work, some of her colleagues have organized her pioneering contributions into this provocative book.

In three parts, Cordova sets out a complete Native American philosophy. First she explains her own understanding of the nature of reality itself—the origins of the world, the relation of matter and spirit, the nature of time, and the roles of culture and language in understanding all of these. She then turns to our role as residents of the Earth, arguing that we become human as we deepen our relation to our people and to our places, and as we understand the responsibilities that grow from those relationships. In the final section, she calls for a new reverence in a world where there is no distinction between the sacred and the mundane.

Cordova clearly contrasts Native American beliefs with the traditions of the Enlightenment and Christianized Europeans (what she calls “Euroman” philosophy). By doing so, she leads her readers into a deeper understanding of both traditions and encourages us to question any view that claims a singular truth. From these essays—which are lucid, insightful, frequently funny, and occasionally angry—we receive a powerful new vision of how we can live with respect, reciprocity, and joy.
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How It Works
Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia
Robert P. Fairbanks II
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Of the some sixty thousand vacant properties in Philadelphia, half of them are abandoned row houses. Taken as a whole, these derelict homes symbolize the city’s plight in the wake of industrial decline. But a closer look reveals a remarkable new phenomenon—street-level entrepreneurs repurposing hundreds of these empty houses as facilities for recovering addicts and alcoholics. How It Works is a compelling study of this recovery house movement and its place in the new urban order wrought by welfare reform.

To find out what life is like in these recovery houses, Robert P. Fairbanks II goes inside one particular home in the Kensington neighborhood. Operating without a license and unregulated by any government office, the recovery house provides food, shelter, company, and a bracing self-help philosophy to addicts in an area saturated with drugs and devastated by poverty. From this starkly vivid close-up, Fairbanks widens his lens to reveal the intricate relationships the recovery houses have forged with public welfare, the formal drug treatment sector, criminal justice institutions, and the local government.

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How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America
Brodkin, Karen
Rutgers University Press, 1998
The fashion identities in the context of a wider conversation about American nationhood, to whom it belongs and what belonging means. Race and ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality are all staple ingredients in this conversation. They are salient aspects of social being from which economic practices, political policies, and popular discourses create "Americans." Because all of these facets of social being have such significant meaning on a national scale, they also have major consequences for both individuals and groups in terms of their success and well-being, as well as how they perceive themselves socially and politically.

The history of Jews in the United States is one of racial change that provides useful insights on race in America. Prevailing classifications have sometimes assigned Jews to the white race and at other times have created an off-white racial designation for them. Those changes in racial assignment have shaped the ways American Jews of different eras have constructed their ethnoracial identities. Brodkin illustrates these changes through an analysis of her own family's multi-generational experience. She shows how Jews experience a kind of double vision that comes from racial middleness: on the one hand, marginality with regard to whiteness; on the other, whiteness and belonging with regard to blackness.

Class and gender are key elements of race-making in American history. Brodkin suggests that this country's racial assignment of individuals and groupsconstitutes an institutionalized system of occupational and residential segregation, is a key element in misguided public policy, and serves as a pernicious foundational principle in the construction of nationhood. Alternatives available to non-white and alien "others" have been either to whiten or to be consigned to an inferior underclass unworthy of full citizenship. The American ethnoracial map-who is assigned to each of these poles-is continually changing, although the binary of black and white is not. As a result, the structure within which Americans form their ethnoracial, gender, and class identities is distressingly stable. Brodkin questions the means by which Americans construct their political identities and what is required to weaken the hold of this governing myth.

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How John Works
Storytelling in the Fourth Gospel
Douglas Estes
SBL Press, 2016

Essential classroom resource for New Testament courses

In this book, a group of international scholars go in detail to explain how the author of the Gospel of John uses a variety of narrative strategies to best tell his story. More than a commentary, this book offers a glimpse at the way an ancient author created and used narrative features such as genre, character, style, persuasion, and even time and space to shape a dramatic story of the life of Jesus.

Features:

  • An introduction to the Fourth Gospel through its narrative features and dynamics
  • Fifteen features of story design that comprise the Gospel of John
  • Short, targeted essays about how John works that can be used as starting points for the study of other Gospels/texts
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How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake
A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide
Luca Crispi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
In this landmark study of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Luca Crispi and Sam Slote have brought together fourteen other leading Joyce experts in a genetic guide to one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing works of fiction. Each essay approaches Finnegans Wake through novel perspectives afforded by Joyce’s preparatory manuscripts. By investigating a work through its manuscripts, genetic criticism both grounds speculative interpretations in an historical, material context and opens up a broader horizon for critical and textual interpretation.

The introduction by Luca Crispi, Sam Slote, and Dirk Van Hulle offers a chronology of the composition of Finnegans Wake, an archival survey of the manuscripts, and an introduction to genetic criticism. Then, the volume provides a chapter-by-chapter interpretation of Finnegans Wake from a variety of perspectives, probing the book as a work in progress. The fruit of more than two decades’ worth of Wakean genetic studies, this book is the essential starting point for all future studies of Joyce’s most complex and fascinating work.
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How Judges Think
Richard A. Posner
Harvard University Press, 2010

A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Richard A. Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases. When conventional legal materials enable judges to ascertain the true facts of a case and apply clear pre-existing legal rules to them, Posner argues, they do so straightforwardly; that is the domain of legalist reasoning. However, in non-routine cases, the conventional materials run out and judges are on their own, navigating uncharted seas with equipment consisting of experience, emotions, and often unconscious beliefs. In doing so, they take on a legislative role, though one that is confined by internal and external constraints, such as professional ethics, opinions of respected colleagues, and limitations imposed by other branches of government on freewheeling judicial discretion. Occasional legislators, judges are motivated by political considerations in a broad and sometimes a narrow sense of that term. In that open area, most American judges are legal pragmatists. Legal pragmatism is forward-looking and policy-based. It focuses on the consequences of a decision in both the short and the long term, rather than on its antecedent logic. Legal pragmatism so understood is really just a form of ordinary practical reasoning, rather than some special kind of legal reasoning.

Supreme Court justices are uniquely free from the constraints on ordinary judges and uniquely tempted to engage in legislative forms of adjudication. More than any other court, the Supreme Court is best understood as a political court.

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How Knowledge Moves
Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology
Edited by John Krige
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Knowledge matters, and states have a stake in managing its movement to protect a variety of local and national interests.  The view that knowledge circulates by itself in a flat world, unimpeded by national boundaries, is a myth. The transnational movement of knowledge is a social accomplishment, requiring negotiation, accommodation, and adaptation to the specificities of local contexts.  This volume of essays by historians of science and technology breaks the national framework in which histories are often written. Instead, How Knowledge Moves takes knowledge as its central object, with the goal of unraveling the relationships among people, ideas, and things that arise when they cross national borders. 
 
This specialized knowledge is located at multiple sites and moves across borders via a dazzling array of channels, embedded in heads and hands, in artifacts, and in texts. In the United States, it shapes policies for visas, export controls, and nuclear weapons proliferation; in Algeria, it enhances the production of oranges by colonial settlers; in Vietnam, it facilitates the exploitation of a river delta. In India it transforms modes of agricultural production.  It implants American values in Latin America. By concentrating on the conditions that allow for knowledge movement, these essays explore travel and exchange in face-to-face encounters and show how border-crossings mobilize extensive bureaucratic technologies.
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How Lawyers Lose Their Way
A Profession Fails Its Creative Minds
Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado
Duke University Press, 2005
In this penetrating book, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado use historical investigation and critical analysis to diagnose the cause of the pervasive unhappiness among practicing lawyers. Most previous writers have blamed the high rate of burnout, depression, divorce, and drug and alcohol dependency among these highly paid professionals on the narrow specialization, long hours, and intense pressures of modern legal practice. Stefancic and Delgado argue that these professional demands are only symptoms of a deeper problem: the way lawyers are taught to think and reason. They show how legal education and practice have been rendered arid and dull by formalism, a way of thinking that values precedent and doctrine above all, exalting consistency over ambiguity, rationality over emotion, and rules over social context and narrative.

Stefancic and Delgado dramatize the plight of modern lawyers by exploring the unlikely friendship between Archibald MacLeish, who gave up a successful but unsatisfying law career to pursue his literary yearnings, and Ezra Pound. Reading the forty-year correspondence between MacLeish and Pound, Stefancic and Delgado draw lessons about the difficulties of attorneys trapped in worlds that give them power, prestige, and affluence but not personal satisfaction, much less creative fulfillment. Long after Pound had embraced fascism, descended into lunacy, and been institutionalized, MacLeish took up his old mentor’s cause, turning his own lack of fulfillment with the law into a meaningful crusade and ultimately securing Pound’s release from St. Elizabeths Hospital. Drawing on MacLeish’s story, Stefancic and Delgado contend that literature, public interest work, and critical legal theory offer tools to contemporary attorneys for finding meaning and overcoming professional dissatisfaction.

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How Libraries and Librarians Help
A Guide to Identifying User-Centered Outcomes
Marian Bouch Hinton
American Library Association, 2005

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How Life Began
Evolution's Three Geneses
Alexandre Meinesz
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The origin of life is a hotly debated topic. The Christian Bible states that God created the heavens and the Earth, all in about seven days roughly six thousand years ago. This episode in Genesis departs markedly from scientific theories developed over the last two centuries which hold that life appeared on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago in the form of bacteria, followed by unicellular organisms half a millennia later. It is this version of genesis that Alexandre Meinesz explores in this engaging tale of life's origins and evolution.
 
How Life Began elucidates three origins, or geneses, of life—bacteria, nucleated cells, and multicellular organisms—and shows how evolution has sculpted life to its current biodiversity through four main events—mutation, recombination, natural selection, and geologic cataclysm. As an ecologist who specializes in algae, the first organisms to colonize Earth, Meinesz brings a refreshingly novel voice to the history of biodiversity and emphasizes here the role of unions in organizing life. For example, the ingestion of some bacteria by other bacteria led to mitochondria that characterize animal and plant cells, and the chloroplasts of plant cells.
 
As Meinesz charmingly recounts, life’s grandeur is a result of an evolutionary tendency toward sociality and solidarity. He suggests that it is our cohesion and collaboration that allows us to solve the environmental problems arising in the decades and centuries to come. Rooted in the science of evolution but enlivened with many illustrations from other disciplines and the arts, How Life Began intertwines the rise of bacteria and multicellular life with Vermeer’s portrait of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the story of Genesis and Noah, Meinesz’s son’s early experiences with Legos, and his own encounters with other scientists. All of this brings a very human and humanistic tone to Meinesz’s charismatic narrative of the three origins of life.
 
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How Life Works
A User’s Guide to the New Biology
Philip Ball
University of Chicago Press, 2023
“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies

A cutting-edge new vision of biology that will revise our concept of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.

 
Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.
 
In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).
 
With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.
 
Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.
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How Lifeworlds Work
Emotionality, Sociality, and the Ambiguity of Being
Michael Jackson
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Michael Jackson has spent much of his career elaborating his rich conception of lifeworlds, mining his ethnographic and personal experience for insights into how our subjective and social lives are mutually constituted.
 
In How Lifeworlds Work, Jackson draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa to highlight the dynamic quality of human relationships and reinvigorate the study of kinship and ritual. How, he asks, do we manage the perpetual process of accommodation between social norms and personal emotions, impulses, and desires? How are these two dimensions of lived reality joined, and how are the dual imperatives of individual expression and collective viability managed? Drawing on the pragmatist tradition, psychology, and phenomenology, Jackson offers an unforgettable, beautifully written account of how we make, unmake, and remake, our lifeworlds. 
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How Like an Angel
A Novel
Jack Driscoll
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"How Like an Angel is a powerfully imagined, lyrically wrought novel, overflowing with the senses. Jack Driscoll is a marvel."
---Rick Bass

"How Like an Angel is a lyrical, lonely ode to fatherhood, an aria in words that looks forward and backward at once. Jack Driscoll is a writer of deep heart, relentless honesty, uncanny gentleness, and irresistible spirit."
---Pam Houston


How Like an Angel is the story of Archibald Angel. With his career going nowhere and a marriage in decline, Angel retreats to a rustic cabin in northern Michigan to make a new life for himself.

In spite of his forward thinking, Angel's move is in many ways a journey into the past. Besides lacking modern comforts, the cabin conjures the ghost of Angel's troubled childhood, when his undertaker father took the cabin in trade as payment from a widow who couldn't otherwise afford the cost of her husband's burial. After Angel's mother subsequently fled, abandoning her family to recover from a mental breakdown, the cabin was an escape for father and son.

While Archibald Angel revisits his knotted and difficult past, his ex-wife and young son contemplate their future. Slowly, with unexpected help from an unpredictable woman, Angel realizes he too must find a way to begin again or risk failing his son as his own father failed him.

With pathos, humor, and unflagging generosity of spirit, How Like an Angel takes us deep into the hinterland of the human heart and discovers there the source of the love that keeps us holding on against all odds.
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How Long Have You Been With Us?
Essays on Poetry
Khaled Mattawa
University of Michigan Press, 2016

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
 
“Like the myriad companions and comrades that he summons from their exile, Khaled Mattawa is himself a ‘poet-stranger.’ In the essays, ‘written in a poet’s prose,’ collected in How Long Have You Been With Us, Mattawa evokes a powerful amalgam of the personal intimacy of the solitary and the political challenge of solidarity.”
—Barbara Harlow, University of Texas at Austin
 
“If you’ve read about exile, you’ve read about Brodsky and Milosz—just as, if you’ve read about translation, you’ve read about Walter Benjamin and George Steiner. While Khaled Mattawa has mastered these masters, his essays about world literature serve as a tour of the rest of the world. He introduces you to the writers you haven’t heard of but should from contemporary Libya and colonial South Asia to Latin America and China. When Mattawa invokes Saadi Youssef or Rabinidrath Tagore, Mohja Kahf or Toru Dutt, the effect is to deprovincialize American literature.”
—Ken Chen, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop
 
Khaled Mattawa, an American poet of Libyan origin, explores various dynamic developments shaping American poetry as it is being practiced today. Arising from an incredibly diverse range personal backgrounds, lyric traditions, and even languages, American poetry is transforming into a truly international form. Mattawa, who also translates Arabic poetry into American English and American poetry into Arabic, explores the poetics and politics of cross-cultural exchange and literary translation that fostered such transformation. The essays in this collection also shed light on Mattawa’s development as a poet and provide numerous portraits of the poets who helped shaped his poetry.

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How Long She'll Last in This World
Maria Melendez
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Let go your keys, let go your gun, let go your good pen and your rings, let your wolf mask go and kiss goodbye your goddess figurine.

With this invocation, María Meléndez beckons us on a journey—an exotic expedition through life’s mysteries in search of the finer strands of experience. In a Latina voice laced with a naturalist’s sense of wonder, she weaves bold images reflecting a world threaded by unseen wounds, now laid before us with an unflinching love of life and an exquisite precision of language. Adopting multiple guises—field researcher, laboring mother, grief-stricken lover—Meléndez casts aside stereotypes and expectations to forge a new language steeped in life and landscape. Whether meditating on a controlled prairie burn or contemplating the turquoise cheek of a fathead minnow, she weaves words and memories into a rich tapestry that resonates with sensual detail and magnifies her sense of maternal wildness, urging us to “Love as much as you / can, don’t throw your heart / away to just one god.” In her paean to the Aztec deity Tonacacihuatl, mother of the gods, Meléndez muses that “How many spirits she’s twin to, and how long she’ll last in this world, / are secrets stashed in the rattle / of corn ears, in the coils / of venomous snakes.”

Through stunning images and stark realism, her poems embrace motherhood and vocation, love and grief, land and life, to bring new meaning to the natural world and how we experience it.
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