Every piece of land, no matter how remote or untrammeled, has a boundary. While sometimes boundary lines follow topographic or biological features, more often they follow the straight lines of political dictate and compromise. Administrative boundaries nearly always fragment a landscape, resulting in loss of species that must disperse or migrate across borders, increased likelihood of threats such as alien species or pollutants, and disruption of natural processes such as fire. Despite the importance and ubiquity of boundary issues, remarkably little has been written on the subject.
Stewardship Across Boundaries fills that gap in the literature, addressing the complex biological and socioeconomic impacts of both public and private land boundaries in the United States. With contributions from natural resource managers, historians, environmentalists, political scientists, and legal scholars, the book:
develops a framework for understanding administrative boundaries and their effects on the land and on human behavior examines issues related to different types of boundaries -- wilderness, commodity, recreation, private-public presents a series of case studies illustrating the efforts of those who have cooperated to promote stewardship across boundaries synthesizes the broad complexity of boundary-related issues and offers an integrated strategy for achieving regional stewardshi.
Stewardship Across Boundaries should spur open discussion among students, scientists, managers, and activists on this important topic. It demonstrates how legal, social, and ecological conditions interact in causing boundary impacts and why those factors must be integrated to improve land management. It also discusses research needs and will help facilitate critical thinking within the scientific community that could result in new strategies for managing boundaries and their impacts.
These assumptions underlie the organization of the volume, which is divided into three parts: "Racial Structures," which explores the problem of how race has historically been structured in modern capitalist societies; "Racial Ideology and Identity," which tackles diverse but interrelated questions regarding the representation of race and racism in dominant ideologies and discourses; and "Struggle," which builds on the insight that resistance to structures and ideologies of racial oppression is always situated in a particular time and place.
In addition to discussing and analyzing various dimensions of the African American experience, contributors also consider the ways in which race plays itself out in the experience of Asian Americans and in the very different geopolitical environments of the British Empire and postcolonial Africa.
Contributors are Pedro Cabán, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, David Crockett, Theodore Koditschek, Scott Kurashige, Clarence Lang, Minkah Makalani, Helen A. Neville, Tola Olu Pearce, David Roediger, Monica M. White, and Jeffrey Williams.
With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome in 2001, the debate over the existence of a biological basis for race has been revived. In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, interdisciplinary scholars join forces to examine the new social, political, and ethical concerns that are attached to how we think about emerging technologies and their impact on current conceptions of race and identity.
Essays explore a range of topics that include drug development and the production of race-based therapeutics, the ways in which genetics could contribute to future health disparities, the social implications of ancestry mapping, and the impact of emerging race and genetics research on public policy and the media.
As genetic research expands its reach, this volume takes an important step toward creating a useful interdisciplinary dialogue about its implications.
After an interview in Newsweek about his book Spirituality in Patient Care and his research in religion and health, Dr. Harold Koenig became the international voice on spirituality, health, and aging. In this book, Faith in the Future, he is joined by two other experts on aging and human development. They present a compelling look at one of the most severe issues in today’s society: health care in America.
How will we provide quality healthcare to older adults needing it during the next thirty to fifty years? Who will provide this care? How will it be funded? How can we establish systems of care now to be in place as demographic and health-related economic pressures mount?
Alongside the sobering reality of our country’s challenges, there are reasons for optimism. Innovative programs created and maintained by volunteers and religious congregations are emerging as pivotal factors in meeting healthcare needs. Summarizing decades of scientific research and providing numerous inspirational examples and role models, the authors present practical steps that individuals and institutions may emulate for putting faith into action.
<"It is inspiring to see a physician who is unafraid to stand up for his religious beliefs and who understands how those beliefs can resonate with good science." —Larry Dossey, MD, author of Reinventing Medicine and Healing Words
The name Harold G. Koenig is well known in the fast-growing field of spirituality and health. Founder and director of the widely respected Duke University Center for Theology, Spirituality, and Health, Dr. Koenig is recognized worldwide for his groundbreaking work in medical science and religious faith. In this book—now available in paperback—he shares his remarkable personal story and shows how personal trials became the catalyst for his pioneering research.
In part one, he describes his turbulent youth: growing up on a California vineyard, college days of experimentation during the 1970s, adventures as a student researcher in Africa with Jane Goodall, an emotional breakdown, expulsion from medical school for disruptive behavior, battling mental illness as a street person in San Francisco. He refers to his ongoing battle with a chronic and debilitating physical disease in terms of the insights it gives him for his work, and he recounts the striking realization of God's call, the people and events that helped him refine a vision into a mission, and the subsequent professional opposition that resided alongside his success.
Part two draws on the real-life examples of former patients and summarizes Koenig's most important findings concerning the impact of Christian faith on mental and physical health, encapsulated by the statement: religious faith and practice are connected to mental and physical health.
In part three he challenges individuals and the American church to consider the implications of the research and to develop constructive ways of implementing the healing connection that can be found in faith.
This volume brings together studies of Ephesos—a major city in the Greco-Roman period and a primary center for the spread of Christianity into the Western world—by an international array of scholars from the fields of classics, fine arts, history of religion, New Testament, ancient Christianity, and archaeology. The studies were presented at a spring 1994 Harvard Divinity School symposium on Ephesos, focusing on the results of one hundred years of archaeological work at Ephesos by members of the Austrian Archaeological Institute.
The contributors to this volume discuss some of the most interesting and controversial results of recent investigations: the Processional Way of Artemis, the Hadrianic Olympieion and the Church of Mary, the so-called Temple of Domitian, and the heroes Androkolos and Arsinoe.
Since very little about the Austrian excavations at Ephesos has been published in English, this volume should prove useful in introducing the archaeology of this metropolis to a wider readership.
This comprehensive history of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest and most significant general organization of scientists in America, provides a unique window on the development of science in the United States during the past 150 years.
The Establishment of Science in America traces the evolution of the role of scientists in American society, public attitudes toward science, and the changing dimensions of the sponsorship of science and its participants. The essays by three distinguished authors connect the AAAS history to issues of continuing importance in American history, such as the integration of women and minority groups into mainstream professions and the role of expert knowledge in a democratic society.
The volume divides the history of the AAAS into three parts: Creating a Forum for Science in the Nineteenth Century; Promoting Science in a New Century: The Middle Years of the AAAS; and Shifting Science from People to Programs: AAAS in the Postwar Years.
Over the past decade, a sea change has occurred in the field of forestry. A vastly increased understanding of how ecological systems function has transformed the science from one focused on simplifying systems, producing wood, and managing at the stand-level to one concerned with understanding and managing complexity, providing a wide range of ecological goods and services, and managing across broad landscapes.
Creating a Forestry for the 21st Century is an authoritative and multidisciplinary examination of the current state of forestry and its relation to the emergent field of ecosystem management. Drawing upon the expertise of top professionals in the field, it provides an up-to-date synthesis of principles of ecosystem management and their implications for forest policy. Leading scientists, including Malcolm Hunter, Jr., Bruce G. Marcot, James K. Agee, Thomas R. Crow, Robert J. Naiman, John C. Gordon, R.W. Behan, Steven L. Yaffee, and many others examine topics that are central to the future of forestry:
Siegfried Kracauer was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant cultural critics, a daring and prolific scholar, and an incisive theorist of film. In this volume his finest writings on modern society make their long-awaited appearance in English.
This book is a celebration of the masses—their tastes, amusements, and everyday lives. Taking up themes of modernity, such as isolation and alienation, urban culture, and the relation between the group and the individual, Kracauer explores a kaleidoscope of topics: shopping arcades, the cinema, bestsellers and their readers, photography, dance, hotel lobbies, Kafka, the Bible, and boredom. For Kracauer, the most revelatory facets of modern life in the West lie on the surface, in the ephemeral and the marginal. Of special fascination to him is the United States, where he eventually settled after fleeing Germany and whose culture he sees as defined almost exclusively by “the ostentatious display of surface.”
With these essays, written in the 1920s and early 1930s and edited by the author in 1963, Kracauer was the first to demonstrate that studying the everyday world of the masses can bring great rewards. The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary essays continue to shed light not only on Kracauer’s later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.
In his introduction, Thomas Levin situates Kracauer in a turbulent age, illuminates the forces that influenced him—including his friendships with Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other Weimar intellectuals—and provides the context necessary for understanding his ideas. Until now, Kracauer has been known primarily for his writings on the cinema. This volume brings us the full scope of his gifts as one of the most wide-ranging and penetrating interpreters of modern life.
What drives development? What new issues have arisen due to globalization? And what kind of policies contribute to development in a rapidly changing world? The studies in Doing Good or Doing Better analyze the different development strategies employed on various continents, address current challenges, and argue that a new approach—one different from the European and American models—is necessary in a globalizing, interdependent world.
Can genes determine which fifty-year-old will succumb to Alzheimer’s, which citizen will turn out on voting day, and which child will be marked for a life of crime? Yes, according to the Internet, a few scientific studies, and some in the biotechnology industry who should know better. Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber gather a team of genetic experts to argue that treating genes as the holy grail of our physical being is a patently unscientific endeavor. Genetic Explanations urges us to replace our faith in genetic determinism with scientific knowledge about how DNA actually contributes to human development.
The concept of the gene has been steadily revised since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. No longer viewed by scientists as the cell’s fixed set of master molecules, genes and DNA are seen as a dynamic script that is ad-libbed at each stage of development. Rather than an autonomous predictor of disease, the DNA we inherit interacts continuously with the environment and functions differently as we age. What our parents hand down to us is just the beginning. Emphasizing relatively new understandings of genetic plasticity and epigenetic inheritance, the authors put into a broad developmental context the role genes are known to play in disease, behavior, evolution, and cognition.
Rather than dismissing genetic reductionism out of hand, Krimsky and Gruber ask why it persists despite opposing scientific evidence, how it influences attitudes about human behavior, and how it figures in the politics of research funding.
The poignant story of Holocaust survivors who returned to their hometown in Poland and tried to pick up the pieces of a shattered world.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the lives of Polish Jews were marked by violence and emigration. But some of those who had survived the Nazi genocide returned to their hometowns and tried to start their lives anew. Lukasz Krzyzanowski recounts the story of this largely forgotten group of Holocaust survivors. Focusing on Radom, an industrial city about sixty miles south of Warsaw, he tells the story of what happened throughout provincial Poland as returnees faced new struggles along with massive political, social, and legal change.
Non-Jewish locals mostly viewed the survivors with contempt and hostility. Many Jews left immediately, escaping anti-Semitic violence inflicted by new communist authorities and ordinary Poles. Those who stayed created a small, isolated community. Amid the devastation of Poland, recurring violence, and bureaucratic hurdles, they tried to start over. They attempted to rebuild local Jewish life, recover their homes and workplaces, and reclaim property appropriated by non-Jewish Poles or the state. At times they turned on their own. Krzyzanowski recounts stories of Jewish gangs bent on depriving returnees of their prewar possessions and of survivors shunned for their wartime conduct.
The experiences of returning Jews provide important insights into the dynamics of post-genocide recovery. Drawing on a rare collection of documents—including the postwar Radom Jewish Committee records, which were discovered by the secret police in 1974—Ghost Citizens is the moving story of Holocaust survivors and their struggle to restore their lives in a place that was no longer home.
The 1936 Olympic Games played a key role in the development of both Hitler’s Third Reich and international sporting competition. The Nazi Olympics gathers essays by modern scholars from prominent participating countries and lays out the issues--sporting as well as political--surrounding the involvement of individual nations.
The volume opens with an analysis of Germany’s preparations for the Games and the attempts by the Nazi regime to allay the international concerns about Hitler’s racist ideals and expansionist ambitions. Essays follow on the United States, Great Britain, and France--top-tier Olympian nations with misgivings about participation--as well as Germany's future Axis partners Italy and Japan. Other contributions examine the issues involved for Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Throughout, the authors reveal the high political stakes surrounding the Games and how the Nazi Olympics distilled critical geopolitical issues of the time into a spectacle of sport.
Much of twentieth-century philosophy was organized around the “linguistic turn,” in which metaphysical and epistemological issues were approached through an analysis of language. This turn was marked by two assumptions: that it was primarily the semantics of language that was relevant to broader philosophical issues, and that declarative assertions were the only verbal acts of serious philosophical interest. In ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance reject these assumptions. Looking at philosophical problems starting with the pragmatics of language, they develop a typology of pragmatic categories of speech within which declaratives have no uniquely privileged position. They demonstrate that non-declarative speech acts—including vocative hails (“Yo!”) and calls to shared attention (“Lo!”)—are as fundamental to the possibility and structure of meaningful language as are declaratives.
Entering into conversation with the work of Anglo-American philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, and Continental philosophers including Heidegger and Althusser, ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ offers solutions (or dissolutions) to long-standing philosophical problems, such as how perception can be both inferentially fecund and responsive to an empirical world, and how moral judgment can be both objective and inherently motivating.
The project examines the influx and significance of imported plants, materializing at port cities across several continents: Marseille, Reposaari, Liverpool, Exeter and Topsham, Dunkerque, Bristol, Antwerp, and most recently New York, where it was awarded the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. In each city, Seeds of Change has revealed the entangled relationship between “alien” plant species and the colonial maritime trade of goods and enslaved peoples, contrasting their seemingly innocuous beauty with the violent history associated with their arrival. By focusing on ballast flora, Alves invites us to de-border postcolonial historical narratives and consider a “borderless history.”
The first monograph of Alves’s historic project, Seeds of Change is edited by Carin Kuoni and Wilma Lukatsch and features essays by the artist as well as Katayoun Chamany, Seth Denizen, Jean Fisher, Yrjö Haila, Richard William Hill, Heli M. Jutila, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Lara Khaldi, Tomaž Mastnak, Marisa Prefer, and Radhika Subramaniam.
Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is a record of Kusch's attempt to immerse himself in the indigenous ways of knowing and being. At first glance, his methodology resembles ethnography. He speaks with and observes indigenous people and mestizos in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. He questions them about their agricultural practices and economic decisions; he observes rituals; he asks women in the market the meaning of indigenous talismans; he interviews shamans; he describes the spatial arrangement and the contents of shrines, altars, and temples; and he reproduces diagrams of archaeological sites, which he then interprets at length. Yet he does not present a "them" to a putative "us." Instead, he offers an inroad to a way of thinking and being that does not follow the logic or fit into the categories of Western social science and philosophy. In his introduction, Walter D. Mignolo discusses Kusch's work and its relation to that of other twentieth-century intellectuals, Argentine history, and contemporary scholarship on the subaltern and decoloniality.
A cultural history of the South Bronx that reaches beyond familiar narratives of urban ruin and renaissance, beyond the “inner city” symbol, to reveal the place and people obscured by its myths.
For decades, the South Bronx was America’s “inner city.” Synonymous with civic neglect, crime, and metropolitan decay, the Bronx became the preeminent symbol used to proclaim the failings of urban places and the communities of color who lived in them. Images of its ruins—none more infamous than the one broadcast live during the 1977 World Series: a building burning near Yankee Stadium—proclaimed the failures of urbanism.
Yet this same South Bronx produced hip hop, arguably the most powerful artistic and cultural innovation of the past fifty years. Two narratives—urban crisis and cultural renaissance—have dominated understandings of the Bronx and other urban environments. Today, as gentrification transforms American cities economically and demographically, the twin narratives structure our thinking about urban life.
A Bronx native, Peter L’Official draws on literature and the visual arts to recapture the history, people, and place beyond its myths and legends. Both fact and symbol, the Bronx was not a decades-long funeral pyre, nor was hip hop its lone cultural contribution. L’Official juxtaposes the artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s carvings of abandoned buildings with the city’s trompe l’oeil decals program; examines the centrality of the Bronx’s infamous Charlotte Street to two Hollywood films; offers original readings of novels by Don DeLillo and Tom Wolfe; and charts the emergence of a “global Bronx” as graffiti was brought into galleries and exhibited internationally, promoting a symbolic Bronx abroad.
Urban Legends presents a new cultural history of what it meant to live, work, and create in the Bronx.
A philosophical exploration of how modern global cinema represents everyday means of resisting authoritarianism and totalitarianism
Václav Havel’s concept of “living within the truth” in an authoritarian regime frames Marguerite La Caze’s readings of international cinema, highlighting forms of resistance in which seemingly pre- or nonpolitical aspects of life—such as professional labor, exile, and truth telling—can be recognized as political when seen against a backdrop of general acquiescence. La Caze’s case studies cross genres, historical eras, and national contexts: the apartheid regime in South Africa, in A Dry White Season; post-Suharto Indonesia, in The Look of Silence; 1980s East Germany, in Barbara; the Chilean military dictatorship, in No; contemporary Iran, in A Separation; and current-day Saudi Arabia, in Wadjda. This book explores the films’ use of image, sound, narrative, and character in dialogue with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Aimé Cesaire, Hannah Arendt, Sara Ahmed, and W. E. B. Du Bois to reveal how cinema depicts ordinary people enacting their own philosophies of defiance.
Told in an elegant style, Jean de la Fontaine's (1621-95) charming animal fables depict sly foxes and scheming cats, vain birds and greedy wolves, all of which subtly express his penetrating insights into French society and the beasts found in all of us. Norman R. Shapiro has been translating La Fontaine's fables for over twenty years, capturing the original work's lively mix of plain and archaic language. This newly complete translation is destined to set the English standard for this work.
Awarded the Lewis Galantière Prize by the American Translators Association, 2008.
Translocas focuses on drag and transgender performance and activism in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Arguing for its political potential, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes explores the social and cultural disruptions caused by Latin American and Latinx “locas” (effeminate men, drag queens, transgender performers, and unruly women) and the various forms of violence to which queer individuals in Puerto Rico and the U.S. are subjected. This interdisciplinary, auto-ethnographic, queer-of-color performance studies book explores the lives and work of contemporary performers and activists including Sylvia Rivera, Nina Flowers, Freddie Mercado, Javier Cardona, Jorge Merced, Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, Monica Beverly Hillz, Lady Catiria, and Barbra Herr; television programs such as RuPaul’s Drag Race; films such as Paris Is Burning, The Salt Mines, and Mala Mala; and literary works by authors such as Mayra Santos-Febres and Manuel Ramos Otero. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a drag performer himself, demonstrates how each destabilizes (and sometimes reifies) dominant notions of gender and sexuality through drag and their embodied transgender expression. These performances provide a means to explore and critique issues of race, class, poverty, national identity, and migratory displacement while they posit a relationship between audiences and performers that has a ritual-like, communal dimension. The book also analyzes the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret in Puerto Rico, and invites readers to challenge, question, and expand their knowledge about queer life, drag, trans performance, and Puerto Rican identity in the Caribbean and the diaspora. The author also pays careful attention to transgender experience, highlighting how trans activists and performers mold their bodies, promote social change, and create community in a context that oscillates between glamour and abjection.
In tracing the history of gold through the ages, this beautiful book showcases the multifarious uses to which the precious metal has been put. Drawing on her own long experience investigating the art and science of metallurgy, Susan La Niece guides readers through the rich history of gold. In detailed images and descriptive text, her book shows us gold over the millennia as coinage, jewelry and ornamentation, high-status vessels, and grave goods; as gifts of distinction, and as radiant symbols in rituals of magic and worship.
Following a glimmering trail through distant times and places, Gold takes us to cultures as disparate as the Mughals of India, the Anglo-Saxons of Britain, and the pre-Hispanic civilizations of the New World. It considers the work of alchemists and goldsmiths, the myths and the legends, the fakes and fine art. And, in the end, it offers a fittingly lavish and deeply informed picture of gold in all its practical, figurative, commercial, artistic, and historical facets.
A Third University is Possible unravels the intimate relationship between the more than 200 US land grant institutions, American settler colonialism, and contemporary university expansion. Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connections between Indian boarding schools, Black education, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California. Central to la paperson’s discussion is the “scyborg,” a decolonizing agent of technological subversion.
Drawing parallels to Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, A Third University is Possible ultimately presents new ways of using language to develop a framework for hotwiring university “machines” to the practical work of decolonization.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Reformers lament that, with every effort to regulate the sources of campaign funding, candidates creatively circumvent the new legislation. But in fact, political fundraisers don't need to look for loopholes because, as Raymond J. La Raja proves, legislators intentionally design regulations to gain advantage over their partisan rivals.
La Raja traces the history of the U.S. campaign finance system from the late nineteenth century through the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002. Then, using the 2004 presidential election as a case study, he compares the ways in which Democrats and Republicans adapted their national fund-raising and campaigning strategies to satisfy BCRA regulations. Drawing upon this wealth of historical and recent evidence, he concludes with recommendations for reforming campaign finance in ways that promote fair competition among candidates and guarantee their accountability to voters.
Small Change offers an engaging account of campaign finance reforms' contradictory history; it is a must-read for anyone concerned about influence of money on democratic elections.
This is the first-ever French-English edition of La Rochefoucauld’s Réflexions, ou sentences et maximes morales, long known in English simply as the Maxims. The translation, the first to appear in forty years, is completely new and aims – unlike all previous versions – at being as literal as possible. This involves, among other things, rendering the same word – for example, amour-propre as “self-love” – as consistently throughout as good sense allows. This also means that the translators have made every effort to maintain La Rochefoucauld’s word order. This allows the reader the best vantage point for viewing La Rochefoucauld’s dramatic and paradoxical juxtapositions of words and ideas, juxtapositions of the utmost importance to understanding his thought. Despite the translation’s concern with literalness, careful attention has been paid to the nuances of the literary character of the Maxims. In addition, this work contains a series of detailed indices that will greatly aid the reader in finding just the right maxim, and an updated version, in English, of the original French index of the work.
At the heart of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims lies the attempt to disclose the great disparity between the exaggerated self-estimation of men and women and their actual condition. As La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) unremittingly unmasks various pretenses, heelaborately exposes the complexity of motives which underlie and inform human conduct: whereas many endeavor to reveal a unity in plurality, La Rochefoucauld endeavors to reveal a plurality in unity. Playful, yet serious, humorous, ironic yet direct, poetic yet philosophical, the Maxims penetrate to themes at the center of reflection and judgment about the human situation. Worthy of study at any time, the Maxims are especially relevant in the strange times in which we live.
This edition includes the 504 maxims of the definitive, fifth edition of 1678, along with 137 other maxims which were either withdrawn from earlier editions or published posthumously. In addition to the maxims, La Rochefoucauld’s self-portrait and Cardinal de Retz’s portrait of La Rochefoucauld are also included.
Joan Crawford forged a new and successful screen image in this powerful women's noir film; winning her an Academy Award for best actress.
Albert J. LaValley's through and insightful guide to Mildred Pierce at once tells us much about the making of this complex film, the problems and process of transferring the story to the screen, the specific and important roles of the producer, director, and set designer, and how the film relates to broad trends within the industry. It is without a doubt the most thorough treatment of this important American motion picture.
The Long Shadows is the first book-length work to offer global perspectives on the environmental history of World War II. Based on long-term research, the selected articles represent the best available studies in different fields and countries. With contributions touching on Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, the book has a truly global approach.
While other edited volumes on the environmental history of warfare discuss multiple wars and various time periods, The Long Shadows is devoted exclusively to World War II and its profound and lasting impact on global environments, encompassing polar, temperate and tropical ecological zones. Divided into three main sections, the first offers an introduction to and holistic overview of the War. The second section of the book examines the social and environmental impacts of the conflict, while the third focuses on the history and legacy of resource extraction. A fourth and final section offers conclusions and hypotheses. Numerous themes and topics are explored in these previously unpublished essays, including the new and innovative field of acoustic ecology, the environmental policies of the Third Reich, Japanese imperialism and marine resources, and the control of Typhus fever.
Aimed at researchers and students in the fields of environmental history, military history, and global history, The Long Shadows will also appeal to a general audience interested in the environmental impact of the greatest military conflict in the history of the world.
Winner, 1999 Missouri Conference on History Book Award
This fascinating biography of a marriage in the Gilded Age closely examines the dynamic flow of power, control, and love between Washington blue blood Violet Blair and New Orleans attorney Albert Janin. Based on their voluminous correspondence as well as Violet’s extensive diaries, it offers a thoroughly intimate portrait of a fifty-four-year union which, in many ways, conformed to societal strictures, yet always created its own definition of itself in order to fit the flux of needs of both husband and wife.
Central to their story is Violet’s fierce determination to maintain her autonomy within the patriarchic institution of marriage. An enduring belle who thought, talked, and acted with the assurance and self-confidence of one whose wishes demanded obedience, she rejected the Victorian ideal of women as silent, submissive consorts. Yet her feminism was a private one, not played out on a public stage but kept to the confines of her own daily life and marriage.
With abundant documentary evidence to draw upon, Laas ties this compelling story to broader themes of courtiship behavior, domesticity, gender roles, extended family bonds, elitism, and societal stereotyping. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century has the dual virtue of making an important historical contribution while also appealing to a broad popular audience.
The idea that American education has been steered by progressive values is celebrated by liberals and deplored by conservatives, but both sides accept it as fact. Adam Laats shows that this widely held belief is simply wrong. Upending the standard narrative of American education as the product of courageous progressive reformers, he calls to center stage the conservative activists who decisively shaped America’s classrooms in the twentieth century. The Other School Reformers makes clear that, in the long march of American public education, progressive reform has more often been a beleaguered dream than an insuperable force.
Laats takes an in-depth look at four landmark school battles: the 1925 Scopes Trial, the 1939 Rugg textbook controversy, the 1950 ouster of Pasadena Public Schools Superintendent Willard Goslin, and the 1974 Kanawha County school boycott. Focused on issues ranging from evolution to the role of religion in education to the correct interpretation of American history, these four highly publicized controversies forced conservatives to articulate their vision of public schooling—a vision that would keep traditional Protestant beliefs in America’s classrooms and push out subversive subjects like Darwinism, socialism, multiculturalism, and feminism. As Laats makes clear in case after case, activists such as Hiram Evans and Norma Gabler, Homer Chaillaux and Louise Padelford were fiercely committed to a view of the curriculum that inculcated love of country, reinforced traditional gender roles and family structures, allowed no alternatives to capitalism, and granted religion a central role in civic life.
Europe and Love in Cinema explores the relationship between love and Europeanness in a wide range of films from the 1920s to the present. A critical look at the manner in which love—in its broadest sense—is portrayed in cinema from across Europe and the United States, this volume exposes constructed notions of "Europeanness" that both set Europe apart and define some parts of it as more "European" than others. Through the international distribution process, these films in turn engage with ideas of Europe from both outside and within, while some, treated extensively in this volume, even offer alternative models of love. A bracing collection of essays from top film scholars, Europe and Love in Cinema demonstrates the centrality of desire to film narrative and explores multiple models of love within Europe's frontiers.
What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children—but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way “this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do.”
Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult.
At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes—to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own.
Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much.
A study exploring the role of event and plot in William Faulkner’s fiction.
Faulkner the Storyteller addresses the role of event and plot in Faulkner's fiction and the creation of an implied teller behind the tale. Novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! are often thought of as canonical modernist texts antagonistic to traditional notions of plot and storytelling. Blair Labatt, however, argues that Faulkner's fiction, regardless of its modernist gestures, is filled and driven by sophisticated manifestations of plot—willed challenges, structural targets, gambits, designs, engagements, and battles—a language of competition and conflict and a syntax of events.
Labatt examines Faulkner's short stories, such as "Mountain Victory," "That Evening Sun," and "Barn Burning," and the architecture of the Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion), and finds that Faulkner's deployment of cause and effect is central to his narratives. Labatt also explores how Faulkner's use of plot creates an implied voice that lends a humorous element to his story's twists and turns that often brackets and encloses the pathos of his characters.
In the past two decades, the familiar experience of attention--the emphasis on a particular mental activity so that it "fills the mind"--has been subjected to much scientific inquiry. David LaBerge now provides a systematic view of the attention process as it occurs in everyday perception, thinking, and action. Drawing from a variety of research methods and findings from cognitive psychology, neurobiology, and computer science, he presents a masterful synthesis of what is understood about attentional processing.
LaBerge explores how we are able to restrict the input of extraneous and confusing information, or prepare to process a future stimulus, in order to take effective action. As well as describing the pathways in the cortex presumed to be involved in attentional processing, he examines the hypothesis that two subcortical structures, the superior colliculus and the thalamus, contain circuit mechanisms that embody an algorithm of attention. In addition, he takes us through various ways of posing the problem, from an information-processing description of how attention works to a consideration of some of the cognitive and behavioral consequences of the brain's computations, such as desiring, judging, imaging, and remembering.
Attentional Processing is a highly sophisticated integration of contributions from several fields of neuroscience. It brings together the latest efforts to solve the puzzle of attention: how it works, how it is modulated, what its benefits are, and how it is expressed in the brain.
Liberal societies conventionally treat religion as unique under the law, requiring both special protection (as in guarantees of free worship) and special containment (to keep religion and the state separate). But recently this idea that religion requires a legal exception has come under fire from those who argue that religion is no different from any other conception of the good, and the state should treat all such conceptions according to principles of neutrality and equal liberty. Cécile Laborde agrees with much of this liberal egalitarian critique, but she argues that a simple analogy between the good and religion misrepresents the complex relationships among religion, law, and the state. Religion serves as more than a statement of belief about what is true, or a code of moral and ethical conduct. It also refers to comprehensive ways of life, political theories of justice, modes of voluntary association, and vulnerable collective identities.
Disaggregating religion into its various dimensions, as Laborde does, has two clear advantages. First, it shows greater respect for ethical and social pluralism by ensuring that whatever treatment religion receives from the law, it receives because of features that it shares with nonreligious beliefs, conceptions, and identities. Second, it dispenses with the Western, Christian-inflected conception of religion that liberal political theory relies on, especially in dealing with the issue of separation between religion and state. As a result, Liberalism’s Religion offers a novel answer to the question: Can Western theories of secularism and religion be applied more universally in non-Western societies?
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Roman Catholic priest, a Trappist monk, a social activist, and a poet. Author of the celebrated autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton has been described as the most important American religious writer of the past hundred years. One of the notable characteristics of Merton's writing, both in poetry and in prose, was his seamless intermingling of religious and Romantic elements, an intermingling that, because of his gifts as a writer and because of his enormous influence, has had the effect of making widespread a distinctive form of religious thought and expression. In Thomas Merton and the Inclusive Imagination, Ross Labrie reveals the breadth of Merton's intellectual reach by taking an original and systematic look at Merton's thought, which is generally regarded as eclectic and unsystematic.
What captured Merton's attention about Romanticism and mysticism and what held his attention virtually all his life was his consciousness of the ontological significance of unity and wholeness. Even though he was far from being a systematic thinker, Merton's writings form a coherent whole when considered from the point of view of his emphasis on unity and wholeness. Labrie skillfully examines Merton's letters, journals, and individual works to show the full expanse of his contribution. By using insights from the Romantic literary tradition and from the mystical tradition, the author is able to make sense of Merton's writings from all periods of his life. Although Labrie covers such sweeping topics as consciousness, self, being, nature, time, myth, culture, and individuation, remaining focused on Merton's specific, unique contributions in each area.
This thought-provoking work, which takes into account material from the recent full publication of Merton's journals and from his Columbia University notebooks on Romanticism, not only shows Merton's intellectual growth but provides a look at his expansive interests as well. Thomas Merton and the Inclusive Imagination will make a significant contribution to Merton studies.
A deep dive into the mechanics of national human rights institutions and the forces that make or break their success.
In the years since World War II, the endeavor to promote human rights has gained momentum and become increasingly important within international relations. Yet these efforts often run into serious problems of enforcement.
Many countries formed national human rights institutions (NHRIs) with independent mandates to support and monitor government compliance with international human rights law. Be they commissions, ombudsmen, or tribunals, these institutions vary in their power and impact. For this book, Corina Lacatus surveyed NHRIs in Europe and around the world to determine their effectiveness and explain why some succeed while others fail.
The Strength of Our Commitments explores the relationship between the domestic and international support an institution receives and its ability to secure resources, credibility, and tangibly improve human rights conditions. Lacatus shows that NHRIs can be models of resilience, even in the face of opposition from political elites. Although their impact on human rights is difficult to measure, The Strength of Our Commitments shows how NHRIs’ strength comes from clearly defined formal powers, strong institutional leadership, and independence from political interference.
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