Since the publication in 1986 of the first edition of Liberalism, both the world and the author’s views have changed significantly. In this new edition, John Gray argues that whereas liberalism was the political theory of modernity, it is ill-equipped to cope with the dilemmas of the postmodern condition. The task now, as Gray sees it, is to develop a pluralist theory, in which the liberal problem of finding a modus vivendi among rival communities and worldviews is solved in postliberal terms.
Copublished with Open University Press
Rogers Smith describes the adverse influence of modern liberalism's governing ideas on the development of American constitutional law and offers a new, more purposive theory to suit contemporary needs. He begins with a fresh analysis of the liberal goals shared by America's constitutional framers and points out the weaknesses of their political thought. Examining vital constitutional doctrines of due process, free speech, voting apportionment, and economic welfare, he demonstrates how contemporary law is often an incoherent patchwork of principles drawn from different historic versions of liberalism.
Smith considers and discards the major modern theories in political philosophy that bear on constitutional law: the democratic relativism of Alexander Bickel and John Hart Ely, the higher-law views inherited from America's religious traditions, and the neo-Kantian liberalism of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. Returning instead to the early liberalism of John Locke, he suggests how a theory centered on the Enlightenment commitment to promoting human capacities for reflective self-direction, or “rational liberty,” might better guide current constitutional debates.
Rogers Smith describes the adverse influence of modern liberalism's governing ideas on the development of American constitutional law and offers a new, more purposive theory to suit contemporary needs. He begins with a fresh analysis of the liberal goals shared by America's constitutional framers and points out the weaknesses of their political thought. Examining vital constitutional doctrines of due process, free speech, voting apportionment, and economic welfare, he demonstrates how contemporary law is often an incoherent patchwork of principles drawn from different historic versions of liberalism.
Smith considers and discards the major modern theories in political philosophy that bear on constitutional law: the democratic relativism of Alexander Bickel and John Hart Ely, the higher-law views inherited from America's religious traditions, and the neo-Kantian liberalism of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. Returning instead to the early liberalism of John Locke, he suggests how a theory centered on the Enlightenment commitment to promoting human capacities for reflective self-direction, or “rational liberty,” might better guide current constitutional debates.
How did liberalism, the great political tradition that from the New Deal to the 1960s seemed to dominate American politics, fall from favor so far and so fast? In this history of liberalism since the 1930s, a distinguished historian offers an eloquent account of postwar liberalism, where it came from, where it has gone, and why. The book supplies a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a valuable and clear perspective on the state of our nation's politics today.
Liberalism and Its Discontents moves from a penetrating interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal to an analysis of the profound and frequently corrosive economic, social, and cultural changes that have undermined the liberal tradition. The book moves beyond an examination of the internal weaknesses of liberalism and the broad social and economic forces it faced to consider the role of alternative political traditions in liberalism's downfall. What emerges is a picture of a dominant political tradition far less uniform and stable--and far more complex and contested--than has been argued. The author offers as well a masterly assessment of how some of the leading historians of the postwar era explained (or failed to explain) liberalism and other political ideologies in the last half-century. He also makes clear how historical interpretation was itself a reflection of liberal assumptions that began to collapse more quickly and completely than almost any scholar could have imagined a generation ago. As both political history and a critique of that history, Liberalism and Its Discontents, based on extraordinary essays written over the last decade, leads to a new understanding of the shaping of modern America.
Most scholars and pundits today view Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy as aggressive liberal leaders, while viewing Schlesinger’s famous histories of their presidencies as celebrations of their steadfast progressive leadership. A more careful reading of Schlesinger’s work demonstrates that he preferred an ironic political outlook emphasizing the virtues of restraint, patience, and discipline. For Schlesinger, Roosevelt and Kennedy were liberal heroes and models as much because they respected the constraints on their power and ideals as because they tested traditional institutions and redefined the boundaries of presidential power.
Aggressive liberalism involves the use of inspirational rhetoric and cunning political tactics to expand civil liberties and insure economic equality. Schlesinger’s emphasis on the crucial role that irony has played and should play in liberalism poses a challenge to the aggressive liberalism advocated by liberal activists, political thinkers, and pundits. That his counsel was grounded in conservative insights as well as liberal values makes it accessible to leaders across the political spectrum.
Like dye cast into water, liberal assumptions color everything American, from ideas about human nature to fears about big government. Not the dreaded “L” word of the 1988 presidential campaign, liberalism in its historical context emerged from the modern faith in free inquiry, natural rights, economic liberty, and democratic government. Expressed in the nation-building acts of revolution and constitution-writing, liberalism both structured and limited Americans’ sense of reality for two centuries.
The nation’s scholars were unable to break away from liberalism’s pervasive hold on the American mind until the last generation—when they recovered the lost world of classical republicanism. Ornate, aristocratic, prescriptive, and concerned with the common good, this form of republicanism held sway among the founding fathers before the triumph of liberal thought, with its simple, egalitarian, rational, and individualistic emphasis. The two concepts, as Joyce Appleby shows, posed choices for eighteenth-century thinkers much as they have divided twentieth-century scholars.
Entering one of the liveliest debates in the scholarly world about our ideological roots, Appleby follows the labyrinthine controversies that these two perspectives have generated in their day and in ours. In doing so, she addresses the tensions that remain to be resolved in the democratic societies of the late twentieth century—the complex relations between individual and community, personal liberty and the common good, aspiration and practical wisdom.
In the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign the word “liberal” was bandied about as though it were a term of abuse. Charges hurled from the political right and left accused liberalism of moral failing: liberalism lacks concern for good character and civic virtue; its preoccupation with private liberty and toleration is morally anemic and ultimately erodes shared public values. Against this background, philosophers and political theorists take stock of the historical varieties of liberal thought and of the present relation between liberalism and moral living.
Liberalism and the Moral Life presents the timely thoughts of twelve prominent scholars who are redrawing the map of liberalism: Richard Ashcraft, Benjamin R. Barber, Seyla Benhabib, William Galston, Amy Gutmann, Stephen Holmes, George Kateb, Steven Lukes, Susan Moller Okin, Nancy Rosenblum, Judith N. Shklar, and Charles Taylor. In essays that go beyond the conventional defense of liberalism based on moral skepticism or the possibility of discovering neutral principles, these writers consider possibilities for reinspiriting liberal thought. They offer fresh arguments for the moral status of individualism and argue that distinctively liberal virtues and practices sustain democracy, constituting a moral life that people share in common. Moving beyond theory, the authors point to a variety of institutional contexts within liberal democracy that provide moral education and opportunities for expressing commitment to substantive moral values.
Liberalism and Transformation is the first scholarly work that explores the historical, philosophical, and intellectual development of global liberalism since the nineteenth century in the context of the deployment of violence, force, and intervention. Using an approach that includes interpretive and contextual analysis of texts from writers, philosophers, and policy-makers across nearly two centuries, as well as historiographical and historical analysis of archival documents (some of which have been recently declassified) and other media, Liberalism and Transformation narrates the messy history of emancipatory liberalism and its engagement with issues of war and peace. The book contributes to both a rethinking of liberal democracy and its relationship to world politics, as well as the effects of liberal internationalism on global processes. Furthermore, Liberalism and Transformation invites readers to reflect on global ethics and transformation in world politics. In the first place, it shows how ethical imaginings of the world have direct effects on actions of transformative importance. In the second place, it suggests that discourses are fluid, changing, and complex.
Why do men and women sometimes risk everything to defend their liberties? What motivates principled opposition to the abuse of power? In Liberalism with Honor, Sharon Krause explores honor as a motive for risky and difficult forms of political action. She shows the sense of honor to be an important source of such action and a spring of individual agency more generally.
Krause traces the genealogy of honor, including its ties to conscientious objection and civil disobedience, beginning in old-regime France and culminating in the American civil rights movement. She examines the dangers intrinsic to honor and the tensions between honor and modern democracy, but demonstrates that the sense of honor has supported political agency in the United States from the founders to democratic reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Honor continues to hold interest and importance today because it combines self-concern and personal ambition with principled higher purposes, and so challenges the disabling dichotomy between self-interest and self-sacrifice that currently pervades both political theory and American public life.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Egypt’s reformers equated liberal notions of nationhood and citizenship with European civilization and culture. As Maghraoui demonstrates, in their efforts to achieve liberalization, they sought to align Egypt with the West and to dissociate it from the Arab and Islamic worlds. Egypt’s professionals and leading cultural figures attempted to replace the fez with European-style hats; they discouraged literary critics from studying Arabic poetry, claiming it was alien to Egyptian culture. Why did they feel compelled to degrade local cultures in order to accommodate liberal principles?
Drawing on the thought of Lacan, Fanon, Said, and Bhabha, as well as contemporary political theory, Maghraoui points to liberalism’s inherent contradiction: its simultaneous commitments to individual liberty and colonial conquest. He argues that when Egypt’s reformers embraced the language of liberalism as their own, they adopted social prejudices built into that language. Efforts to achieve liberalization played out—and failed—within the realm of culture, not just within the political arena. Opinions voiced through literary works, cartoons, newspaper articles on controversial social issues, and other forms of cultural expression were ultimately more important to the fate of liberalism in Egypt than were questions of formal political participation and representation. Liberalism without Democracy demonstrates the powerful—and under appreciated—role of language and culture in defining citizenship and political community.
A modern reframing of Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work for the 21st century.
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was both an intellectual milestone and a source of political division, spurring fiery debates around capitalism and its discontents. In the ensuing discord, Hayek’s true message was lost: liberalism is a thing to be protected above all else, and its alternatives are perilous.
In Liberalism’s Last Man, Vikash Yadav revives the core of Hayek’s famed work to map today’s primary political anxiety: the tenuous state of liberal meritocratic capitalism—particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia—in the face of strengthening political-capitalist powers like China, Vietnam, and Singapore. As open societies struggle to match the economic productivity of authoritarian-capitalist economies, the promises of a meritocracy fade; Yadav channels Hayek to articulate how liberalism’s moral backbone is its greatest defense against repressive social structures.
A modern reframing of Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work for the 21st century.
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was both an intellectual milestone and a source of political division, spurring fiery debates around capitalism and its discontents. In the ensuing discord, Hayek’s true message was lost: liberalism is a thing to be protected above all else, and its alternatives are perilous.
In Liberalism’s Last Man, Vikash Yadav revives the core of Hayek’s famed work to map today’s primary political anxiety: the tenuous state of liberal meritocratic capitalism—particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia—in the face of strengthening political-capitalist powers like China, Vietnam, and Singapore. As open societies struggle to match the economic productivity of authoritarian-capitalist economies, the promises of a meritocracy fade; Yadav channels Hayek to articulate how liberalism’s moral backbone is its greatest defense against repressive social structures.
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?
Moving beyond elite figurations of globalizing Indian youth, Lukose draws on ethnographic research to examine how non-elite college students in the southern state of Kerala mediate region, nation, and globe. Kerala sits at the crossroads of development and globalization. Held up as a model of left-inspired development, it has also been transformed through an extensive and largely non-elite transnational circulation of labor, money, and commodities to the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Focusing on fashion, romance, student politics, and education, Lukose carefully tracks how gender, caste, and class, as well as colonial and postcolonial legacies of culture and power, affect how students navigate their roles as citizens and consumers. She explores how mass-mediation and an expanding commodity culture have differentially incorporated young people into the structures and aspirational logics of globalization.
With its rocky transition to democracy, post-Soviet Russia has made observers wonder whether a moderating liberalism could ever succeed in such a land of extremes. But in Liberals under Autocracy, Anton A. Fedyashin looks back at the vibrant Russian liberalism that flourished in the country’s late imperial era, chronicling its contributions to the evolution of Russia’s rich literary culture, socioeconomic thinking, and civil society.
For five decades prior to the revolutions of 1917, The Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy) was the flagship journal of Russian liberalism, garnering a large readership. The journal articulated a distinctively Russian liberal agenda, one that encouraged social and economic modernization and civic participation through local self-government units (zemstvos) that defended individual rights and interests—especially those of the peasantry—in the face of increasing industrialization. Through the efforts of four men who turned The Herald into a cultural nexus in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, the publication catalyzed the growing influence of journal culture and its formative effects on Russian politics and society.
Challenging deep-seated assumptions about Russia’s intellectual history, Fedyashin’s work casts the country’s nascent liberalism as a distinctly Russian blend of self-governance, populism, and other national, cultural traditions. As such, the book stands as a contribution to the growing literature on imperial Russia's nonrevolutionary, intellectual movements that emphasized the role of local politics in both successful modernization and the evolution of civil society in an extraparliamentary environment.
The histories and character of the party branches vary as widely as their locations. The Cape Verdeans of New Bedford, Massachusetts, were initially viewed as a particular challenge for the local Panthers but later became the mainstay of the Boston-area party. In the early 1970s, the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, chapter excelled at implementing the national Black Panther Party’s strategic shift from revolutionary confrontation to mainstream electoral politics. In Detroit, the Panthers were defined by a complex relationship between their above-ground activities and an underground wing dedicated to armed struggle. While the Milwaukee chapter was born out of a rising tide of black militancy, it ultimately proved more committed to promoting literacy and health care and redressing hunger than to violence. The Alabama Black Liberation Front did not have the official imprimatur of the national party, but it drew heavily on the Panthers’ ideas and organizing strategies, and its activism demonstrates the broad resonance of many of the concerns articulated by the national party: the need for jobs, for decent food and housing, for black self-determination, and for sustained opposition to police brutality against black people. Liberated Territory reveals how the Black Panther Party’s ideologies, goals, and strategies were taken up and adapted throughout the United States.
Contributors: Devin Fergus, Jama Lazerow, Ahmad A. Rahman, Robert W. Widell Jr., Yohuru Williams
Drucilla K. Barker is Professor of Economics and Women's Studies, Hollins University.
Susan F. Feiner is Associate Professor of Economics and Women's Studies, University of Southern Maine.
Liberating Language identifies experiences of nineteenth-century African Americans—categorized as sites of rhetorical education—that provided opportunities to develop effective communication and critical text-interpretation skills. Author Shirley Wilson Logan considers how nontraditional sites, which seldom involved formal training in rhetorical instruction, proved to be effective resources for African American advancement.
Logan traces the ways that African Americans learned lessons in rhetoric through language-based activities associated with black survival in nineteenth-century America, such as working in political organizations, reading and publishing newspapers, maintaining diaries, and participating in literary societies. According to Logan, rhetorical training was manifested through places of worship and military camps, self-education in oratory and elocution, literary societies, and the black press. She draws on the experiences of various black rhetors of the era, such as
Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Fanny Coppin, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and the lesser-known Oberlin-educated Mary Virginia Montgomery, Virginia slave preacher "Uncle Jack," and former slave "Mrs. Lee."
Liberating Language addresses free-floating literacy, a term coined by scholar and writer Ralph Ellison, which captures the many settings where literacy and rhetorical skills were acquired and developed, including slave missions, religious gatherings, war camps, and even cigar factories. In Civil War camp- sites, for instance, black soldiers learned to read and write, corresponded with the editors of black newspapers, edited their own camp-based papers, and formed literary associations.
Liberating Language outlines nontraditional means of acquiring rhetorical skills and demonstrates how African Americans, faced with the lingering consequences of enslavement and continuing oppression, acquired rhetorical competence during the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century.
Randy Stoecker has been “practicing” forms of community-engaged scholarship, including service learning, for thirty years now, and he readily admits, “Practice does not make perfect.” In his highly personal critique, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement, the author worries about the contradictions, unrealized potential, and unrecognized urgency of the causes as well as the risks and rewards of this work.
Here, Stoecker questions the prioritization and theoretical/philosophical underpinnings of the core concepts of service learning: 1. learning, 2. service, 3. community, and 4. change. By “liberating” service learning, he suggests reversing the prioritization of the concepts, starting with change, then community, then service, and then learning. In doing so, he clarifies the benefits and purpose of this work, arguing that it will create greater pedagogical and community impact.
Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement challenges—and hopefully will change—our thinking about higher education community engagement.
The powerful novelist here turns penetrating critic, giving us—in lively style—both trenchant literary analysis and fresh insight on the art of writing.
“When African American writers began to trust the literary possibilities of their own verbal and musical creations,” writes Gayl Jones, they began to transform the European and European American models, and to gain greater artistic sovereignty.” The vitality of African American literature derives from its incorporation of traditional oral forms: folktales, riddles, idiom, jazz rhythms, spirituals, and blues. Jones traces the development of this literature as African American writers, celebrating their oral heritage, developed distinctive literary forms.
The twentieth century saw a new confidence and deliberateness in African American work: the move from surface use of dialect to articulation of a genuine black voice; the move from blacks portrayed for a white audience to characterization relieved of the need to justify. Innovative writing—such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s depiction of black folk culture, Langston Hughes’s poetic use of blues, and Amiri Baraka’s recreation of the short story as a jazz piece—redefined Western literary tradition.
For Jones, literary technique is never far removed from its social and political implications. She documents how literary form is inherently and intensely national, and shows how the European monopoly on acceptable forms for literary art stifled American writers both black and white. Jones is especially eloquent in describing the dilemma of the African American writers: to write from their roots yet retain a universal voice; to merge the power and fluidity of oral tradition with the structure needed for written presentation. With this work Gayl Jones has added a new dimension to African American literary history.
During the 1920s and 1930s at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, working-class women were educated in the liberal arts and instructed in writing to assume more powerful roles in the industrial workplace. In Liberating Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, Karyn L. Hollis tells the remarkable story of how this multiclass, multiethnic American institution rooted in composition pedagogy, literary history, and leftist thought emerged from the broad social, economic, and ideological trends of the era. The summer school curriculum, Hollis shows, enhanced the individual and collective self-confidence of the 1,800 women who studied there between 1921 and 1938.
Drawing heavily on the women’s writings—including autobiography, poetry, labor drama, humor, and economic reporting—Liberating Voices adds significantly to the small oeuvre of published writing by working-class women, who were, in this case, mostly nontraditional students, immigrants, and minorities. Outlining a materialist pedagogy that centers on the women’s daily economic struggles as well as their family and community experiences, Hollis reveals the tensions that stemmed from differences in race, ethnicity, class, and religion. She also shows how the students exploited cultural scripts and drew strength from their diversity, eventually insisting on a democratic sharing of power with faculty and administrators at the Summer School.
Hollis provides a thorough ethnography of the Summer School with respect to its place in the social and political history of the 1920s and 1930s, and then situates the school’s pedagogy within the history of American education and composition instruction. Concepts from literary criticism and composition theory provide the framework for an analysis of the working women’s autobiographical writing, revealing how the narrative voice of their prose grew from weak and individualized to empowered and collective as the women described their families, childhood, work, unions, and education over time. The volume is complemented by sixteen illustrations.
Additional analysis of the women’s poetry points to their skill as both producers and consumers of literature. The common theme of body versus a powerful machine in the workplace bears witness to the industrial exploitation the women endured. Taking up postmodern questions of agency and voice, Hollis argues that the women used a variety of cultural texts to construct discourses that reflected their needs and desires. Liberating Voices not only provides a previously untold chapter in the history of American worker education, it also showcases a liberating pedagogy that has salient implications for contemporary classrooms.
Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation—including the Code noir—that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.
Delving into three hundred years of Chinese literature, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, The Libertine’s Friend uncovers the complex and fascinating history of male homosexual and homosocial relations in the late imperial era. Drawing particularly on overlooked works of pornographic fiction, Giovanni Vitiello offers a frank exploration of the importance of same-sex love and eroticism to the evolution of masculinity in China.
Vitiello’s story unfolds chronologically, beginning with the earliest sources on homoeroticism in pre-imperial China and concluding with a look at developments in the twentieth century. Along the way, he identifies a number of recurring characters—for example, the libertine scholar, the chivalric hero, and the lustful monk—and sheds light on a set of key issues, including the social and legal boundaries that regulated sex between men, the rise of male prostitution, and the aesthetics of male beauty. Drawing on this trove of material, Vitiello presents a historical outline of changing notions of male homosexuality in China, revealing the integral part that same-sex desire has played in its culture.
French philosopher Charles Renouvier played an influential role in reviving philosophy in France after it was proscribed during the Second Empire. Drawn to the ideals of the French Revolution, Renouvier came to recognize that the free will and civil liberties he supported were essential to the pursuit of science, contrary to the ideologies of positivists and socialists who would restrict liberty in the name of science. He struggled against monarchy and religious authority in the period up through 1848 and defended a liberal, secular form of political organization at a critical turning point in French history, the beginning of the Third Republic. As Warren Schmaus argues, Renouvier’s work provides an example of one way in which philosophy of science can succeed in bringing about change in political life—by critiquing political ideologies that falsely claim absolute certainty on religious, scientific, or any other grounds. Liberty and the Pursuit of Knowledge explores the understudied relationship between Renouvier’s philosophy of science and his political philosophy, shedding new light on the significance of his thought for the history of philosophy.
Liberty Lanes is a bowling alley in a small Montana town where a senior bowling league meets three times a week. Nelson Moore, one of the bowlers, has recently become a local hero by saving a teammate from choking on a happy hour chicken bone. Now he must deal with his newfound fame while coping with the early stages of dementia.
This is an engaging and often moving novel about a group of senior citizens bound together by old friendships and romances, and by their determination to live life to its fullest. Senescence is not for sissies, but these characters show us that it is still a time to love, dream, and explore their own potential.
The opioid epidemic, and other behavioral health issues such as alcohol and drug abuse, directly impact every community across the nation; and, by extension, public libraries’ daily work. Because libraries are not only trusted guardians of information but also vital community centers, people struggling with addictive behaviors as well as their family members and friends often turn to the library for help. But many library workers feel overwhelmed, finding themselves unprepared for serving these patrons in an effective and empathetic way. This book encourages readers to turn their fears and uncertainty into strengths and empowerment, offering to-the-point guidance on welcoming people with substance use disorders and their loved ones through policy, materials, outreach, collaboration, programs, and services. Written by a frontline librarian whose personal experiences inform the book, this resource
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the Harvard University Library today is that in this largest university library in the world primary emphasis is placed upon a regard for the individual which extends alike to staff, faculty, students, and general users. As director of the Library, Paul Buck was responsible for this attitude. This book reflects his view that as the center of university education and research a library owes a responsibility both to the people who use libraries and to those who operate them. Personal consideration must be united with the mechanization and automation that is essential in developing a modern library's collections, circulation, and special services.
Here are addresses, articles, and reports in which Mr. Buck interprets the Harvard Library to its own staff, to the academic community, and to the general public. For the general reader who wants to know something of the nature and significance of university libraries, the author presents a historical view as well as an interesting picture of what the largest library of its kind is doing today.
The collection begins with a talk given at Monticello in 1954 in which Mr. Buck announced his university library credo, emphasizing the importance of the university library, its personnel, and its services to the community. This credo he restates at the end of this volume. Throughout the book are speeches bearing on the author's conception of libraries for teaching and research as well as a description of the administrative program at Harvard that he based on this conception.
He analyzes problems involved in recruiting, training, and retaining a quality staff of professional librarians. In one article he deals with the new personnel program adopted by the Harvard Library in 1958. In another he is concerned with the remarkably successful plan for recruiting "library interns" that is now in operation at Harvard. Still another paper discusses a landmark of his administration, the installation of a mechanized circulation system.
Included here also are addresses reflecting Mr. Buck's broad historical perspective. He deals with the long-range future of libraries generally and with the prospects of American universities. He is concerned with relations between historians, librarians, and businessmen. In a short paper he touches on another landmark of his administration--the first steps taken in planning the John F. Kennedy library.
Publishing, after all, is a complex business, and the trend in the marketplace is to economies of scale and the consolidation of smaller publishers into the fold of the largest. It does not seem a propitious moment for a library to become a small independent publisher.
So why are libraries doing this? How is this similar or different from the services commercial publishers provide? Does it involve offering the same services, or are new models, types of content, and needs resulting in new solutions that suit new players?
This book will help the reader understand the context of library publishing. It also explores when a publishing program is a good fit for a library and provides guidance for defining, launching, or growing a publishing initiative.
With textbook readers and digital downloads proliferating, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish. Such forecasts miss the mark, argue Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive—although in a variety of new social, cultural, and architectural forms. Schnapp and Battles combine deep study of the library’s history with a record of institutional and technical innovation at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of the digital humanities. They gather these currents in The Library Beyond the Book, exploring what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels.
Libraries have always been mix-and-match spaces, and remix is their most plausible future scenario. Speculative and provocative, The Library Beyond the Book explains book culture for a world where the physical and the virtual blend with ever increasing intimacy.
Founded in 1921, the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin has become one of the world’s great libraries for the study of Latin America, as well as the largest university library collection of Latin American materials in the United States. Encompassing all areas of the Western Hemisphere that were ever part of the Spanish or Portuguese empires, the Benson Collection documents Latin American history and culture from the first European contacts to the current activities of Latinas/os in the United States. Scholars, students, and members of the public from around the world regularly use the multifaceted, multimedia resources of the Benson.
Showcasing the incredible depth, diversity, and history of the Benson Collection, A Library for the Americas presents rare books and manuscripts, maps, photographs, music, oral histories, art and objects dating from the early 1500s to the present. Images of and captions for these materials are paired with a series of essays and reflections by distinguished scholars of Latin American and Latina/o studies, who describe the role that the Benson Collection has played in the research and intellectual contributions that have defined their careers. As a whole, the book celebrates the remarkable place for learning that is the Benson Collection, while not shying away from larger questions about what it means to have a monumental library and archive devoted to Latin America in the United States.
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