front cover of Field Guide to the Introduced Flora of South Georgia
Field Guide to the Introduced Flora of South Georgia
Rebecca Upson
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2017
In the late eighteenth century, the first sealing ships from England arrived in South Georgia. With them came a host of invasive plants, which set to work upending the island ecosystem. Today, forty-one non-native plant species are established in the region and, even a century later, they continue to threaten the native species and habitats of South Georgia.
This is the first field guide to comprehensively cover these species, providing full-color photographs, distribution maps, and species descriptions, plus keys to the grasses and sedges of the area. This guide is accessible even to non-botanists and also provides an opportunity for visitors to be part of a citizen science program contributing sightings and improving our knowledge of the introduced flora of South Georgia.
[more]

front cover of Hard Choices
Hard Choices
Challenging the Singapore Consensus
Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh
National University of Singapore Press, 2014
Singapore is changing. The consensus that the PAP government has constructed and maintained over five decades is fraying. The assumptions that underpin Singaporean exceptionalism are no longer accepted as easily and readily as before. Among these are the ideas that the country is uniquely vulnerable, that this vulnerability limits its policy and political options, that good governance demands a degree of political consensus that ordinary democratic arrangements cannot produce, and that the country’s success requires a competitive meritocracy accompanied by relatively little income or wealth redistribution.


But the policy and political conundrums that Singapore faces today are complex and defy easy answers. Confronted with a political landscape that is likely to become more contested, how should the government respond? What reforms should it pursue? This collection of essays suggests that a far-reaching and radical rethinking of the country's policies and institutions is necessary, even if it weakens the very consensus that enabled Singapore to succeed in its first fifty years.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests
Intellectual Interchange between the Northern Maya Lowlands and Highland Mexico in the Late Postclassic Period
Gabrielle Vail
Harvard University Press, 2010
Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests examines evidence for cultural interchange among the intellectual powerbrokers in Postclassic Mesoamerica, specifically those centered in the northern Maya lowlands and the central Mexican highlands. Contributors to the volume’s thirteen chapters bring an interdisciplinary perspective to understanding the interactions that led to shared content in hieroglyphic codices and mural art. The authors address similarities in artifacts, architectural styles, and building alignments—often produced in regions separated by hundreds of miles—based on their analyses of iconographic, archaeological, linguistic, and epigraphic material. The volume includes a wealth of new data and interpretive frameworks in this comprehensive discussion of a critical time period in the Mesoamerican past.
[more]

front cover of The Censors
The Censors
A Bilingual Selection of Stories
Luisa Valenzuela
Northwestern University Press, 1988
The Censors is the only bilingual collection of fiction by Luisa Valenzuela, one of Latin America's best known and most widely translated authors. This selection of stories from Clara, Strange Things Happen Here, and Open Door, which delves into the personal and political realities under authoritarian rule, gives a rich representation of her literary talent.
[more]

front cover of The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language
The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language
Clayton Valli
Gallaudet University Press, 2021

Created by an unparalleled board of experts led by renowned ASL linguist and poet Clayton Valli, The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language contains over 3,000 illustrations. Each sign illustration, including depictions of fingerspelling when appropriate, incorporates a complete list of English synonyms. A full, alphabetized English index enables users to cross-reference words and signs throughout the entire volume.

       The comprehensive introduction lays the groundwork for learning ASL by explaining in plain language the workings of ASL syntax and structure. It also offers examples of idioms and describes the antecedents of ASL, its place in the Deaf community, and its meaning in Deaf culture. This extraordinary reference also provides a special section on ASL classifiers and their use. Readers will find complete descriptions of the various classifiers and examples of how to use these integral facets of ASL. The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language is an outstanding ASL reference for all instructors, students, and users of ASL.

*Please note that this paperback edition does not include the DVD found in the hardcover edition. 

[more]

front cover of Linguistics of American Sign Language Text, 3rd Edition
Linguistics of American Sign Language Text, 3rd Edition
An Introduction
Clayton Valli
Gallaudet University Press, 2001
New 4th Edition completely revised and updated with new DVD now available; ISBN 1-56368-283-4
[more]

front cover of Linguistics of American Sign Language, 5th Ed.
Linguistics of American Sign Language, 5th Ed.
An Introduction
Clayton Valli
Gallaudet University Press, 2011

Completely reorganized to reflect the growing intricacy of the study of ASL linguistics, the 5th edition presents 26 units in seven parts. Part One: Introduction presents a revision of Defining Language and an entirely new unit, Defining Linguistics. Part Two: Phonology has been completely updated with new terminology and examples. The third part, Morphology, features units on building new signs, deriving nouns from verbs, compounds, fingerspelling, and numeral incorporation. Part Four: Syntax includes units on basic sentence types, lexical categories, word order, time and aspect, verbs, and the function of space. The fifth part, Semantics, offers updates on the meanings of individual signs and sentences.

Part Six: Language in Use showcases an entirely new section on Black ASL in the unit on Variation and Historical Change. The units on bilingualism and language and ASL discourse have been thoroughly revised and updated, and the Language as Art unit has been enhanced with a new section on ASL in film. Two new readings update Part Seven, and all text illustrations have been replaced by video stills from the expanded video content. Also, signs described only with written explanations in past editions now have both photographic samples in the text and full demonstrations in the video.

You can find the supplemental video content on the Gallaudet University Press YouTube channel.
 

[more]

front cover of Interactive Logic
Interactive Logic
Selected Papers from the 7th Augustus de Morgan Workshop, London
Johan van Benthem
Amsterdam University Press, 2007
Traditionally, logic has dealt with notions of truth and reasoning. In the past several decades, however, research focus in logic has shifted to the vast field of interactive logic—the domain of logics for both communication and interaction. The main applications of this move are logical approaches to games and social software; the wealth of these applications was the focus of the seventh Augustus de Morgan Workshop in November 2005. This collection of papers from the workshop serves as the initial volume in the new series Texts in Logics and Games—touching on research in logic, mathematics, computer science, and game theory.
 
“A wonderful demonstration of contemporary topics in logic.”—Wiebe van der Hoek, University of Liverpool
 
[more]

front cover of The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past
The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past
Curating Heritage, Art and Activism
Emma van Bijnen
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Institutions across the globe are increasingly questioned on how their foundations are rooted in colonialism and how they aim to ‘decolonize’. The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices. It also explores possible futures: What can heritage institutions learn from (international) best practices regarding the ‘decolonization’ of museums? And what role can contemporary artistic practices take in these processes? Through a variety of essays, interventions, interviews, and a roundtable conversation, scholars and cultural practitioners address these complex questions.
[more]

front cover of Museums in a Digital Culture
Museums in a Digital Culture
How Art and Heritage Become Meaningful
Chiel van den Akker
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The experience of engaging with art and history has been utterly transformed by information and communications technology in recent decades. We now have virtual, mediated access to countless heritage collections and assemblages of artworks, which we intuitively browse and navigate in a way that wasn't possible until very recently. This collection of essays takes up the question of the cultural meaning of the information and communications technology that makes these new engagements possible, asking questions like: How should we theorise the sensory experience of art and heritage? What does information technology mean for the authority and ownership of heritage?
[more]

front cover of Images of the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945-1949/Perang Kemerdekaan Indonesia dalam Gambar
Images of the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945-1949/Perang Kemerdekaan Indonesia dalam Gambar
Sander van der Horst
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Four years of protracted negotiations and bitter warfare passed between the declaration of Indonesian independence on 17 August, 1945, and the official transfer of sovereignty on 27 December, 1949. Whereas the newly proclaimed Republic of Indonesia rejected the colonial regime and hence any attempt at ‘recolonization’ by the Dutch after the Japanese occupation (1942-1945), the Dutch framed their return to the archipelago as a mission to restore ‘order and peace’. Images of the Indonesian War. Many of these materials, alongside photographs and oral history collections, ended up in the collections of the KITLV and eventually the Leiden University Libraries. This trilingual (English, Dutch and Indonesian) catalogue accompanies a digital exhibition of some fifty unique items. The selection made demonstrates the sharply contrasting perspectives on the legitimacy of the Republic and Dutch colonialism, and also offers first-hand testimonies of a bitter war with a huge imbalance of casualties.
[more]

front cover of Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean
Ways of Being Non/Sovereign
Yvon van der Pijl
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean is a collection of essays that explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom on the non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, historical and media analysis, the study of popular culture, and autoethnographic accounts, the various contributions challenge conventional assumptions about political non/sovereignty. While the book recognizes the existence of nationalist independence movements, it opens a critical space to look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty, and a good life. Focusing on all six different islands and through a multitude of voices and stories, the volume engages with the everyday projects, ordinary imaginaries, and dreams of equaliberty alongside the work of independistas and traditional social movements aiming for more or full self-determination. As such, it offers a rich and powerful telling of the various ways of being in and belonging to our contemporary postcolonial world.
[more]

front cover of Public Health in Asia during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Public Health in Asia during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Global Health Governance, Migrant Labour, and International Health Crises
Anoma van der Veere
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Every nation in Asia has dealt with COVID-19 differently and with varying levels of success in the absence of clear and effective leadership from the WHO. As a result, the WHO’s role in Asia as a global health organization is coming under increasing pressure. As its credibility is slowly being eroded by public displays of incompetence and negligence, it has also become an arena of contestation. Moreover, while the pandemic continues to undermine the future of global health governance as a whole, the highly interdependent economies in Asia have exposed the speed with which pandemics can spread, as intensive regional travel and business connections have caused every area in the region to be hit hard. The migrant labor necessary to sustain globalized economies has been strained and the security of international workers is now more precarious than ever, as millions have been left stranded, seen their entry blocked, or have limited access to health services. This volume provides an accessible framework for the understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Asia, with a specific emphasis on global governance in health and labor.
[more]

front cover of Islam and Popular Culture
Islam and Popular Culture
Karin van Nieuwkerk
University of Texas Press, 2016

Popular culture serves as a fresh and revealing window on contemporary developments in the Muslim world because it is a site where many important and controversial issues are explored and debated. Aesthetic expression has become intertwined with politics and religion due to the uprisings of the “Arab Spring,” while, at the same time, Islamist authorities are showing increasingly accommodating and populist attitudes toward popular culture. Not simply a “westernizing” or “secularizing” force, as some have asserted, popular culture now plays a growing role in defining what it means to be Muslim.

With well-structured chapters that explain key concepts clearly, Islam and Popular Culture addresses new trends and developments that merge popular arts and Islam. Its eighteen case studies by eminent scholars cover a wide range of topics, such as lifestyle, dress, revolutionary street theater, graffiti, popular music, poetry, television drama, visual culture, and dance throughout the Muslim world from Indonesia, Africa, and the Middle East to Europe. The first comprehensive overview of this important subject, Islam and Popular Culture offers essential new ways of understanding the diverse religious discourses and pious ethics expressed in popular art productions, the cultural politics of states and movements, and the global flows of popular culture in the Muslim world.

[more]

front cover of Properties of Plastics
Properties of Plastics
A Guide for Conservators
Thea B. van Oosten
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
A practical, comprehensive resource on the complex behaviors of plastics written expressly for conservation and cultural heritage professionals.
 
Almost every museum in the world is confronted with plastics in their collections. Research initiatives and knowledge concerning the conservation of heritage objects made of plastics have proliferated over the last twenty-five years, necessitating this up-to-date, comprehensive resource. Intended as a highly practical guide for the conservation community, this authoritative book offers information essential to understanding plastics, polymers, and rubber/elastomers and their behaviors in the cultural heritage context. Numerous graphs, diagrams, and illustrations allow readers to compare the mechanical, physical, thermal, and optical properties of these substances during conservation. Aimed at the hands-on museum practitioner, this book will assist professionals in choosing the appropriate methods and materials for preserving and treating plastic objects.
 
Complementing the main chapters, fifty-six illustrated “fact sheets” summarize, at a glance, the properties of those plastics most commonly found in museum collections. Six informative case studies present real-world examples of current conservation approaches to works of art and design made of plastics and rubber/elastomers. Under the expert authorship of Thea B. van Oosten, conservation scientist, educator, and internationally regarded authority on the behavior and properties of plastics, this instructive volume is destined to become an invaluable resource for the field.
[more]

front cover of Letters and Poems to and from Her Mentor and Other Members of Her Circle
Letters and Poems to and from Her Mentor and Other Members of Her Circle
Anna Maria van Schurman
Iter Press, 2021
Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded as the most erudite woman in seventeenth-century Europe. As “the Star of Utrecht,” she was active in a network of learning that included the most renowned scholars of her time. Known for her extensive learning and her defense of the education of women, she was the first woman to sit in on lectures at a university in the Netherlands and to advocate that women be admitted into universities. She was proficient in fourteen languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Persian, Samaritan, and Ethiopian, as well as several vernacular European languages.

This volume presents in translation a remarkable collection of her letters and poems—many of which were previously unpublished—that span almost four decades of her life, from 1631 to 1669.
 
[more]

front cover of The Eagle and the Virgin
The Eagle and the Virgin
Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940
Mary Kay Vaughan
Duke University Press, 2006
When the fighting of the Mexican Revolution died down in 1920, the national government faced the daunting task of building a cohesive nation. It had to establish control over a disparate and needy population and prepare the country for global economic competition. As part of this effort, the government enlisted the energy of artists and intellectuals in cultivating a distinctly Mexican identity. It devised a project for the incorporation of indigenous peoples and oversaw a vast, innovative program in the arts. The Eagle and the Virgin examines the massive nation-building project Mexico undertook between 1920 and 1940.

Contributors explore the nation-building efforts of the government, artists, entrepreneurs, and social movements; their contradictory, often conflicting intersection; and their inevitably transnational nature. Scholars of political and social history, communications, and art history describe the creation of national symbols, myths, histories, and heroes to inspire patriotism and transform workers and peasants into efficient, productive, gendered subjects. They analyze the aesthetics of nation building made visible in murals, music, and architecture; investigate state projects to promote health, anticlericalism, and education; and consider the role of mass communications, such as cinema and radio, and the impact of road building. They discuss how national identity was forged among social groups, specifically political Catholics, industrial workers, middle-class women, and indigenous communities. Most important, the volume weighs in on debates about the tension between the eagle (the modernizing secular state) and the Virgin of Guadalupe (the Catholic defense of faith and morality). It argues that despite bitter, violent conflict, the symbolic repertoire created to promote national identity and memory making eventually proved capacious enough to allow the eagle and the virgin to coexist peacefully.

Contributors. Adrian Bantjes, Katherine Bliss, María Teresa Fernández, Joy Elizabeth Hayes, Joanne Hershfield, Stephen E. Lewis, Claudio Lomnitz, Rick A. López, Sarah M. Lowe, Jean Meyer, James Oles, Patrice Olsen, Desmond Rochfort, Michael Snodgrass, Mary Kay Vaughan, Marco Velázquez, Wendy Waters, Adriana Zavala

[more]

front cover of Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing
Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing
Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38
Minnie Vautrin
University of Illinois Press, 2007

In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into China's capital city of Nanjing and launched six weeks of carnage that would become known as the Rape of Nanjing. In addition to the deaths of Chinese POWs and civilians, tens of thousands of women were raped, tortured, and killed by Japanese soldiers. In this traumatic environment, both native and foreign-born inhabitants of Nanjing struggled to carry on with their lives.

This volume collects the diaries and correspondence of Minnie Vautrin, a farmgirl from Illinois who had dedicated herself to the education of Chinese women at Ginling College in Nanjing. Faced with the impending Japanese attack, she turned the school into a sanctuary for ten thousand women and girls. Vautrin's firsthand accounts of daily life in Nanjing and the intensifying threat of Japanese invasion reveal the courage of the occupants under siege--Chinese nationals as well as Western missionaries, teachers, surgeons and business people--and the personal costs of violence in wartime.

Thanks to Vautrin's painstaking effort in keeping a day-to-day account, present-day readers are able to examine this episode of history at close range through her eyes. With detailed maps, photographs, and carefully researched in-depth annotations, Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38 presents a comprehensive and detailed daily account of the events and of life during the horror-stricken days within the city walls and in particular on the Ginling campus. Through chronologically arranged diaries, letters, reports, documents, and telegrams, Vautrin bears witness to those terrible events and to the magnitude of trauma that the Nanjing Massacre exacted on the populace.

[more]

front cover of Bill Veeck's Crosstown Classic
Bill Veeck's Crosstown Classic
Bill Veeck
University of Chicago Press, 1962
Baseball Hall of Famer Bill Veeck (1914–86) was an inspired team builder, a consummate showman, and one of the greatest baseball men ever involved in the game. Bill Veeck’s Crosstown Classic, drawn from his uproarious autobiography (cowritten with the talented sportswriter Ed Linn), is an unforgettable trip packed with anecdotes and insight about the history of baseball and tales of players and owners—some of the most entertaining stories in all of sports literature. Veeck’s own love for the game began when his father was manager and then President of the Chicago Cubs; upon his father’s death in 1930, Veeck was hired as an office boy for eighteen dollars a week. Here, Veeck recollects those halcyon days and how they underscored his development as a wily franchise owner, leading up to quite a rumpus, many years later, during his purchase of the White Sox from the “Battling Comiskeys.”

[more]

front cover of Veeck As In Wreck
Veeck As In Wreck
The Autobiography of Bill Veeck
Bill Veeck
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Bill Veeck was an inspired team builder, a consummate showman, and one of the greatest baseball men ever involved in the game. His classic autobiography, written with the talented sportswriter Ed Linn, is an uproarious book packed with information about the history of baseball and tales of players and owners, including some of the most entertaining stories in all of sports literature.
[more]

front cover of Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun
Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun
María Vela Y Cueto
Iter Press, 2016

When María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.

[more]

front cover of Il trovatore
Il trovatore
Critical Edition Study Score
Giuseppe Verdi
University of Chicago Press, 2016
The Works of Giuseppe Verdi is the first critical edition of the composer’s oeuvre. Together with his operas, the series presents his songs, his choral music and sacred pieces, and his string quartet and other instrumental works.

Based on Verdi’s autograph score and an examination of important secondary sources, including contemporary manuscript copies and performing parts, this edition of Il trovatore identifies and resolves numerous ambiguities of harmony, melodic detail, text, and phrasing that have marred previous scores. Scholars and performers alike will find a wealth of information in the critical apparatus to inform their research and interpretations. The introduction to the score outlines the work’s genesis, sources, and performance history, while the critical commentary discusses all editorial decisions.
[more]

front cover of Il trovatore
Il trovatore
Dramma in Four Parts by Salvadore Cammarano
Giuseppe Verdi
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Il trovatore, the middle opera of Verdi's famous "trilogy" of the 1850s (with Rigoletto and La traviata), is the sixth work to be published in The Works of Giuseppe Verdi. Based on Verdi's autograph score and an examination of important secondary sources including contemporary manuscript copies and performing parts, the edition identifies and resolves numerous ambiguities of harmony, melodic detail, text, and phrasing that have marred previous scores. Scholars and performers alike will find a wealth of information in the critical apparatus to inform their research and interpretations.

The lengthy introduction to the score discusses the work's genesis, sources, and performance history as well as issues of instrumental and vocal performance practice, production and staging, and problems of notation. As an added feature of the introduction is an original study by Carlos Matteo Mossa of the creation of the libretto, based on the original draft and numerous other autograph documents.
[more]

front cover of Macbeth
Macbeth
Melodramma in Four Acts. Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave
Giuseppe Verdi
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Verdi had a special fondness for Macbeth, and the first version of his opera based on Shakespeare's play is arguably the most important work of his formative years. But dissatisfied with the work of his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, Verdi reworked the text himself and lavished the score with particular attention. The premiere in Florence in 1847 was a great success, but for the Paris premiere in 1865, Verdi made substantial changes, adding dances and an entirely new aria, duet, chorus, and death scene. Clearly, he intended that Macbeth II supersede the earlier version, and today the "Paris" version is the one generally performed.

Published in three volumes, this critical edition of Macbeth is the only one based entirely on autograph sources. Containing the later version as the principal score, it is the first edition to consult the composer's manuscripts of the revised pieces, preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. An appendix contains the earlier movements, and David Lawton provides a wide-ranging introduction to the opera's complex history. This critical edition of Macbeth includes here for the first time Verdi's preferred text—the version he set to music—as well as his own stage directions and thus offers the most vivid and dramatic reading to date.
[more]

front cover of Gridiron Gourmet
Gridiron Gourmet
Gender and Food at the Football Tailgate
Maria J. Veri
University of Arkansas Press, 2019
On football weekends in the United States, thousands of fans gather in the parking lots outside of stadiums, where they park their trucks, let down the gates, and begin a pregame ritual of drinking and grilling.

Tailgating, which began in the early 1900s as a quaint picnic lunch outside of the stadium, has evolved into a massive public social event with complex menus, extravagant creative fare, and state-of-art grilling equipment. Unlike traditional notions of the home kitchen, the blacktop is a highly masculine culinary environment in which men and the food they cook are often the star attractions.

Gridiron Gourmet examines tailgating as shown in television, film, advertising, and cookbooks, and takes a close look at the experiences of those tailgaters who are as serious about their brisket as they are about cheering on their favorite team, demonstrating how and why the gendered performances on the football field are often matched by the intensity of the masculine displays in front of grills, smokers, and deep fryers.
[more]

front cover of The Greeks
The Greeks
Jean-Pierre Vernant
University of Chicago Press, 1995
What do we mean when we speak of ancient Greeks? A person from the Archaic period? The war hero celebrated by Homer? Or the fourth century "political animal" described by Aristotle? In this book, leading scholars show what it meant to be Greek during the classical period of Greek civilization.

The Greeks offers the most complete portraits available of typical Greek personages from Athens to Sparta, Arcadia, Thessaly and Epirus to the city-states of Asia Minor, to the colonies of the Black Sea, southern Italy, and Sicily. Looking at the citizen, the religious believer, the soldier, the servant, the peasant, and others, they show what—in the Greek relationships with the divine, with nature, with others, and with the self—made him "different" in his ways of acting, thinking, and feeling.

The contributors to this volume are Jean-Pierre Vernant, Claude Mosse, Yvon Garlan, Giuseppe Cambiano, Luciano Canfora, James Redfield, Charles Segal, Oswyn Murray, Mario Vegetti, and Philippe Borgeaud.
[more]

front cover of The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring
The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring
A Season of Rebirth?
Charles Villa-Vicencio
Georgetown University Press, 2015

The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring addresses the often unspoken connection between the powerful call for a political-cultural renaissance that emerged with the end of South African apartheid and the popular revolts of 2011 that dramatically remade the landscape in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Looking between southern and northern Africa, the transcontinental line from Cape to Cairo that for so long supported colonialism, its chapters explore the deep roots of these two decisive events and demonstrate how they are linked by shared opposition to legacies of political, economic, and cultural subjugation. As they work from African, Islamic, and Western perspectives, the book’s contributors shed important light on a continent’s difficult history and undertake a critical conversation about whether and how the desire for radical change holds the possibility of a new beginning for Africa, a beginning that may well reshape the contours of global affairs.

[more]

front cover of The Black Press
The Black Press
New Literary and Historical Essays
Todd Vogel
Rutgers University Press, 2001

In a segregated society in which black scholars, writers, and artists could find few ways to reach an audience, journalism was a means of dispersing information to communities throughout the United States. The black press has offered incisive critiques of such issues as racism, identify, class, and economic injustice, but that contribution to public discourse has remained largely unrecognized until now. The original essays in this volume broaden our understanding of the “public sphere” and show how marginalized voices attempted to be heard in the circles of debate and dissent that existed in their day.

The Black Press progresses chronologically from slavery to the impact and implications of the Internet to reveal how the press’s content and its very form changed with evolving historical and cultural conditions in America. The first papers fought for rights for free blacks in the North. The early twentieth-century black press sought to define itself and its community amidst American modernism. Writers in the 1960s took on the task of defining revolution in that decade’s ferment. It was not been until the mid-twentieth century that African American cultural study began to achieve intellectual respectability.

The Black Press addresses the production, distribution, regulation, and reception of black journalism in order to illustrate a more textured public discourse, one that exchanges ideas not just within the black community, but also within the nation at large. The essays demonstrate that the black press redefined class, restaged race and nationhood, and reset the terms of public conversation, providing a fuller understanding of not just African American culture, but also the varied cultural battles fought throughout our country’s history.

 

[more]

front cover of Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decisionmaking?
Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decisionmaking?
A Hedgefoxian Perspective
Kathleen D. Vohs
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
Philosophers have long tussled over whether moral judgments are the products of logical reasoning or simply emotional reactions. From Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility to the debates of modern psychologists, the question of whether feeling or sober rationality is the better guide to decision making has been a source of controversy. In Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? Kathleen Vohs, Roy Baumeister, and George Loewenstein lead a group of prominent psychologists and economists in exploring the empirical evidence on how emotions shape judgments and choices. Researchers on emotion and cognition have staked out many extreme positions: viewing emotions as either the driving force behind cognition or its side effect, either an impediment to sound judgment or a guide to wise decisions. The contributors to Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? provide a richer perspective, exploring the circumstances that shape whether emotions play a harmful or helpful role in decisions. Roy Baumeister, C. Nathan DeWall, and Liqing Zhang show that while an individual's current emotional state can lead to hasty decisions and self-destructive behavior, anticipating future emotional outcomes can be a helpful guide to making sensible decisions. Eduardo Andrade and Joel Cohen find that a positive mood can negatively affect people's willingness to act altruistically. Happy people, when made aware of risks associated with altruistic acts, become wary of jeopardizing their own well-being. Benoît Monin, David Pizarro, and Jennifer Beer find that whether emotion or reason matters more in moral evaluation depends on the specific issue in question. Individual characteristics often mediate the effect of emotions on decisions. Catherine Rawn, Nicole Mead, Peter Kerkhof, and Kathleen Vohs find that whether an individual makes a decision based on emotion depends both on the type of decision in question and the individual's level of self-esteem. And Quinn Kennedy and Mara Mather show that the elderly are better able to regulate their emotions, having learned from experience to anticipate the emotional consequences of their behavior. Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? represents a significant advance toward a comprehensive theory of emotions and cognition that accounts for the nuances of the mental processes involved. This landmark book will be a stimulus to scholarly debates as well as an informative guide to everyday decisions.
[more]

front cover of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
Vladimir Voinovich
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat and orders to guard a downed plane. Apparently forgotten by his unit, Chonkin resumes his life as a peasant and passes the war tending the village postmistress's garden. Just after the German invasion, the secret police discover this mysterious soldier lurking behind the front line. Their pursuit of Chonkin and his determined resistance lead to wild skirmishes and slapstick encounters.
[more]

front cover of Pretender to the Throne
Pretender to the Throne
Further Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
Vladimir Voinovich
Northwestern University Press, 1995
This hilarious novel following the continuing adventures of Ivan Chonkin, a simple peasant who has been arrested as a traitor after spending World War II happily tending a garden. In this sequel to The Extraordinary Life and Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Vladimir Voinovich ridicules everything sacred to the Soviet Union—the army, the justice system, the press, and Stalin himself—in a refreshing combination of dissident conscience and universal humor.
[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
The Future of Extended Deterrence
The United States, NATO, and Beyond
Stéfanie von Hlatky
Georgetown University Press, 2015

Are NATO’s mutual security commitments strong enough today to deter all adversaries? Is the nuclear umbrella as credible as it was during the Cold War? Backed by the full range of US and allied military capabilities, NATO’s mutual defense treaty has been enormously successful, but today’s commitments are strained by military budget cuts and antinuclear sentiment. The United States has also shifted its focus away from European security during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and more recently with the Asia rebalance. Will a resurgent Russia change this?

The Future of Extended Deterrence brings together experts and scholars from the policy and academic worlds to provide a theoretically rich and detailed analysis of post–Cold War nuclear weapons policy, nuclear deterrence, alliance commitments, nonproliferation, and missile defense in NATO but with implications far beyond. The contributors analyze not only American policy and ideas but also the ways NATO members interpret their own continued political and strategic role in the alliance.

In-depth and multifaceted, The Future of Extended Deterrence is an essential resource for policy practitioners and scholars of nuclear deterrence, arms control, missile defense, and the NATO alliance.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
New Plant Sources for Drugs and Foods from the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium
Siri von Reis
Harvard University Press, 1982

This companion volume to Siri von Reis's previous exploration of ethnobotanical notes in the Harvard herbaria brings to light a new array of plants with drug or food potential, offering wide-ranging possible applications for pharmacologists, chemists, botanists, and even anthropologists. Following the same criteria as in earlier investigations, the authors have examined the vast holdings of The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium to select little-known plant uses and to record any note suggesting biodynamic constituents--i.e., those having effects on living tissue--from skin irritants and poisons and medications of any kind to foods, beverages, and spices. They have also included species whose applications suggest other kinds of unreported chemical activity, plants associated with magic or ritual which affected people in some unusual way.

Listing the notes in the order in which the species were found in the collection, family by family, the authors call attention to similar characteristics in related species and families having biodvnamic properties in common. Each entry begins with the Latin name of the specimen, cites the country in which it was collected, the collector's name, and his held number for the plant, and then quotes the ethnobotanical or other note of interest.

While in itself a valuable reference work in the search for clues to useful plants, New Plant Source for Drugs and Foods also will enhance the value of the first volume by allowing a comparison of entries.

[more]

front cover of The Challenge of Modernity
The Challenge of Modernity
German Social and Cultural Studies, 1890-1960
Adelheid von Saldern
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Adelheid von Saldern is one of the most productive, thoughtful, and innovative researchers in the field of twentieth-century German history. Her already long career has been distinguished by a willingness to take intellectual risks by participating in new historiographical movements, borrowing from cultural anthropology, focusing on the social and cultural history of everyday life, and demonstrating the importance of gender history. In this volume, she expressly focuses on the various challenges modernity posed to German society between 1900 and 1960. Throughout, von Saldern is particularly concerned with public perceptions, debates, and attitudes.
The essays contained in The Challenge of Modernity cover three distinct subject areas: the history of the Social Democratic labor movement, housing, and popular and mass culture. More specifically, von Saldern addresses the self-modernizing Social Democratic Party; Social Democrats' and Communists' opposing views of modernization; social rationalization in the private sphere (particularly with regard to women and hygiene); sport; the arrival of "trashy" literature, movies, and radio in Germany; and cultural conservatives' attempts to enhance a national and Volks-culture in opposition to mass-culture, Americanization, and the avant-garde. The variety of responses to the modernization process, as well as von Saldern's focus on social agents, makes this book unique.
Required reading for scholars of social, cultural, and gender history, The Challenge of Modernity will also find an audience among urban anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists. Von Saldern's ability to combine a strong theoretical framework with concrete historical examples will also make this outstanding reading for undergraduate and graduate students seeking to familiarize themselves with the history of German society and culture.
Adelheid von Saldern is Professor of Modern History and Director, Historisches Seminar, Universität Hanover.
[more]

front cover of New Infinitary Mathematics
New Infinitary Mathematics
Petr Vopenka
Karolinum Press, 2023
A rethinking of Cantor and infinitary mathematics by the creator of Vopěnka's principle.
 
The dominant current of twentieth-century mathematics relies on Georg Cantor’s classical theory of infinite sets, which in turn relies on the assumption of the existence of the set of all natural numbers, the only justification for which—a theological justification—is usually concealed and pushed into the background.

This book surveys the theological background, emergence, and development of classical set theory, warning us about the dangers implicit in the construction of set theory, and presents an argument about the absurdity of the assumption of the existence of the set of all natural numbers. It instead proposes and develops a new infinitary mathematics driven by a cautious effort to transcend the horizon bounding the ancient geometric world and mathematics prior to set theory, while allowing mathematics to correspond more closely to the real world surrounding us. Finally, it discusses real numbers and demonstrates how, within a new infinitary mathematics, calculus can be rehabilitated in its original form employing infinitesimals.
[more]

front cover of Contours of the Illiberal State
Contours of the Illiberal State
Governing Circulation in the Smart Economy
Boris Vormann
Campus Verlag, 2019
The post-Cold War era was marked by the emergence of unprecedented new networks of international private trade, cooperation, and circulation of goods that promised to render the state nearly obsolete—at least in theory. The essays collected in this book dissect the notions of this so-called “smart economy,” revealing the crucial role that government interventions still play in facilitating the production and the global flow of goods. The contributors focus particularly on the role played by the United States, often incorrectly assumed to be the most liberal and least interventionist in the global order. More than a mere market fixer, the United States has long assumed an outsized position in expediting the global circulation of goods through its supply chains and communication channels. Drawing from such diverse fields as political science, urban sociology, and cultural studies, Contours of the Illiberal State takes a broad interdisciplinary look at how nations became active market enablers.
[more]

front cover of Magical Muse
Magical Muse
Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams
Ralph F. Voss
University of Alabama Press, 2002
In this unique and engaging collection, twelve essays celebrate the legacy of one of America's most important playwrights and investigate Williams's enduring effect on America's cultural, theatrical, and literary heritage.
 
Like Faulkner before him, Tennessee Williams gave universal appeal to southern characters and settings. His major plays, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie to A Streetcar Named Desire and Night of the Iguana, continue to capture America's popular imagination, a significant legacy. Though he died in 1983, only recently have Williams's papers become available to the public, bringing to light a number of intriguing discoveries—letters, drafts, and several unpublished and unproduced plays. These recent developments make a reassessment of Williams's life and work both timely and needed.

The essays in this collection originated as presentations at the 27th annual Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature at The University of Alabama in 1999. The book addresses a wide range of topics, among them the influence of popular culture on Williams's plays, and, in turn, his influence on popular culture; his relationship to Hollywood and his struggles with censorship, Hollywood standards, and the competing vision of directors such as Elia Kazan; his depictions of gender and sexuality; and issues raised by recently discovered plays.

Anyone interested in American literature and drama will find this collection of fresh, accessible essays a rewarding perspective on the life, work, and legacy of one of the bright stars of American theatre.
 

 

[more]

front cover of Optimal Adaptive Control and Differential Games by Reinforcement Learning Principles
Optimal Adaptive Control and Differential Games by Reinforcement Learning Principles
Draguna Vrabie
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2012
This book gives an exposition of recently developed approximate dynamic programming (ADP) techniques for decision and control in human engineered systems. ADP is a reinforcement machine learning technique that is motivated by learning mechanisms in biological and animal systems. It is connected from a theoretical point of view with both adaptive control and optimal control methods. The book shows how ADP can be used to design a family of adaptive optimal control algorithms that converge in real-time to optimal control solutions by measuring data along the system trajectories. Generally, in the current literature adaptive controllers and optimal controllers are two distinct methods for the design of automatic control systems. Traditional adaptive controllers learn online in real time how to control systems, but do not yield optimal performance. On the other hand, traditional optimal controllers must be designed offline using full knowledge of the systems dynamics. It is also shown how to use ADP methods to solve multi-player differential games online. Differential games have been shown to be important in H-infinity robust control for disturbance rejection, and in coordinating activities among multiple agents in networked teams. The focus of this book is on continuous-time systems, whose dynamical models can be derived directly from physical principles based on Hamiltonian or Lagrangian dynamics.
[more]

front cover of And No Birds Sing
And No Birds Sing
Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
Craig Waddell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Craig Waddell presents essays investigating Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book, Silent Spring. In his foreword, Paul Brooks, Carson’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, describes the process that resulted in Silent Spring. In an afterword, Linda Lear, Carson’s recent biographer, recalls the end of Carson’s life and outlines the attention that Carson’s book and Carson herself received from scholars and biographers, attention that focused so minutely on her life that it detracted from a focus on her work. The foreword by Brooks and the afterword by Lear frame this exploration within the context of Carson’s life and work.

Contributors are Edward P. J. Corbett, Carol B, Gartner, Cheryll Glotfelty, Randy Harris, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Linda Lear, Ralph H. Lutts, Christine Oravec, Jacqueline S. Palmer, Markus J. Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Craig Waddell. Together, these essays explore Silent Spring’seffectiveness in conveying its disturbing message and the rhetorical strategies that helped create its wide influence.

[more]

front cover of Mestizo Genomics
Mestizo Genomics
Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America
Peter Wade
Duke University Press, 2014
In genetics laboratories in Latin America, scientists have been mapping the genomes of local populations, seeking to locate the genetic basis of complex diseases and to trace population histories. As part of their work, geneticists often calculate the European, African, and Amerindian genetic ancestry of populations. Some researchers explicitly connect their findings to questions of national identity and racial and ethnic difference, bringing their research to bear on issues of politics and identity.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, the contributors to Mestizo Genomics explore how the concepts of race, ethnicity, nation, and gender enter into and are affected by genomic research. In Latin America, national identities are often based on ideas about mestizaje (race mixture), rather than racial division. Since mestizaje is said to involve relations between European men and indigenous or African women, gender is a key factor in Latin American genomics and in the analyses in this book. Also important are links between contemporary genomics and recent moves toward official multiculturalism in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. One of the first studies of its kind, Mestizo Genomics sheds new light on the interrelations between "race," identity, and genomics in Latin America.

Contributors. Adriana Díaz del Castillo H., Roosbelinda Cárdenas, Vivette García Deister, Verlan Valle Gaspar Neto, Michael Kent, Carlos López Beltrán, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, Eduardo Restrepo, Mariana Rios Sandoval, Ernesto Schwartz-Marín, Ricardo Ventura Santos, Peter Wade
[more]

front cover of Hybrid Museum Experiences
Hybrid Museum Experiences
Theory and Design
Annika Waern
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
“So you’re the one getting this gift? Lucky you! Someone who knows you has visited the museum. They searched out things they thought you would care about, and they took photos and left messages for you.” This is the welcoming message for the Gift app, designed to create a very personal museum visit. Hybrid Museum Experiences use new technologies to augment, expand or alter the physical experience of visiting the museum. They are designed to be experienced in close relation to the physical space and exhibit. In this book we discuss three forms of hybridity in museum experiences: incorporating the digital and the physical, creating social, yet personal and intimate experiences, and exploring ways to balance visitor participation and museum curation. The book reports on a three-year cross-disciplinary research project in which artists, design researchers and museum professionals have collaborated to create technology-mediated experiences that merge with the museum environment.
[more]

front cover of Kafka's Prague
Kafka's Prague
Klaus Wagenbach
Haus Publishing, 2020
Nearly one hundred years after Franz Kafka’s death, his works continue to intrigue and haunt us. Kafka is regarded as one of the most significant intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and even for those who are only barely acquainted with his novels, stories, diaries, or letters, “Kafkaesque” has become a term synonymous with the menacing, unfathomable absurdity of modern existence and bureaucracy. While the significance of his fiction is wide-reaching, Kafka’s writing remains inextricably bound up with his life and work in a particular place: Prague. It is here that the author spent every one of his forty years.

Drawing from a range of documents and historical materials, this is the first book specifically dedicated to the relationship between Kafka and Prague. Klaus Wagenbach’s account of Kafka’s life in the city is a meticulously researched insight into the author’s family background, his education and employment, his attitude toward the town of his birth, his literary influences, and his relationships with women. The result is a fascinating portrait of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic writer and the city that provided him with so much inspiration. W. G. Sebald recognized that “literary and life experience overlap” in Kafka’s works, and the same is true of this book.
 
[more]

front cover of Genetics and the Unsettled Past
Genetics and the Unsettled Past
The Collision of DNA, Race, and History
Keith Wailoo
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to perform a kind of racially charged cultural work: to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the “nature” of identity in the present.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history.

This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines—biology, history, cultural studies, law, medicine, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology—to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book’s essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.

[more]

front cover of Nevermore
Nevermore
Cécile Wajsbrot
Seagull Books, 2024
A meditation on loss and recovery through the act of translation and its recuperative powers.

An unnamed translator mourning the loss of a close friend retreats to Dresden to translate the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. Translating this lyrical evocation of time and its devastations in a city with which the writer has no connections and where neither her language nor Woolf’s are spoken offers an interruption to the course of her life. She immerses herself in this prose poem of ephemerality. 

The narrator delves into phrases from “Time Passes” and subjects them to the inexact science and imperfect art of translation. This, in turn, leads her to wide-ranging reflections on other instances of loss, destruction, and recovery—the Chernobyl disaster, the High Line in New York City, the bombing of Dresden and Wallmann’s commemorative Bell Requiem Dresden, the evacuation of the Hebridean island Foula, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of seascapes, Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie,” and Ceri Richards’s series of paintings by the same name. She reflects on places that are destined for decay and yet are returning to life, broken worlds in which there is still strength for a new beginning. In Tess Lewis’s visionary English translation, Cécile Wajsbrot’s lyrical exploration of the role of the writer and translator becomes an exquisite meditation on loss and recovery.
 
[more]

front cover of We Had Fun and Nobody Died
We Had Fun and Nobody Died
Adventures of a Milwaukee Music Promoter
Amy T. Waldman
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2024

The entertaining and inspiring story of a stubbornly independent promoter and club owner 

This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus at UW–Milwaukee, booking thousands of concerts across Wisconsin and the Midwest, and opening Shank Hall, the beloved Milwaukee venue named after a club in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap.

This funny, nostalgia-inducing book details the lasting friendships Jest established over the years with John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, and Milwaukee’s own Violent Femmes, among others. It also shines a light into the seldom-seen world of music promotion, as Jest attempts to manage a turbulent band on the road, negotiates with agents, deals with fires (both real and metaphorical), struggles through a pandemic, and takes pleasure in presenting music of all kinds—from world-famous acts to up-and-coming local bands. In addition to photos of celebrated musicians, the book includes concert posters, tickets, and backstage passes documenting decades of rock, folk, and alternative shows that helped put Milwaukee on the live music map.

As the music industry has become dominated by profit-driven corporations, We Had Fun and Nobody Died chronicles the career of a one-of-a-kind independent promoter whose hardheadedness and love of music have helped him keep it real and make it in the music business for more than forty years. 

[more]

front cover of Risk, Courage, and Women
Risk, Courage, and Women
Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry
Karen A. Waldron
University of North Texas Press, 2007

logo for Harvard University Press
The Nariokotome Homo erectus Skeleton
Alan Walker
Harvard University Press, 1993
On the slopes of the Nariokotome sand river in Kenya, sifting through sediments more than a million years old, Kamoya Kimeu uncovered a small piece of a skull. Piece followed piece—facial bones, teeth, vertebrae—and little by little paleontologists put together the most complete early hominid ever discovered, a Homo erectus skeleton christened the Nariokotome boy. This phenomenal find, a milestone in the history of paleoanthropology, is fully documented in this remarkable book. Beautifully illustrated and richly descriptive, The Nariokotome Homo erectus Skeleton takes us into the field and the laboratory, and into the far reaches of prehistory, to show us what the fossilized remains of a young boy can tell us about our beginnings.
[more]

front cover of A Natural History of the Mojave Desert
A Natural History of the Mojave Desert
Lawrence R. Walker
University of Arizona Press, 2018
The Mojave Desert has a rich natural history. Despite being sandwiched between the larger Great Basin and Sonoran Deserts, it has enough mountains, valleys, canyons, and playas for any eager explorer. Ancient and current waterways carve the bajadas and valley bottoms. This diverse topography gives rise to a multitude of habitats for plants and animals, many of which are found nowhere else in the world.

A Natural History of the Mojave Desert explores how a combination of complex geology, varied geography, and changing climate has given rise to intriguing flora and fauna—including almost 3,000 plant species and about 380 terrestrial vertebrate animal species. Of these, one quarter of the plants and one sixth of the animals are endemic.

The authors, who, combined, have spent more than six decades living in and observing the Mojave Desert, offer a scientifically insightful and personally observed understanding of the desert. They invite readers to understand how the Mojave Desert looks, sounds, feels, tastes, and smells. They prompt us to understand how humans have lived in this desert where scant vegetation and water have challenged humans, past and present.

A Natural History of the Mojave Desert provides a lively and informed guide to understanding how life has adapted to the hidden riverbeds, huge salt flats, tiny wetlands, and windswept hills that characterize this iconic desert.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
John Andrews
Architect of Uncommon Sense
Paul Walker
Harvard University Press

Though he garnered global praise at the peak of his career from 1960 to 1990, Australian architect John Andrews faced waning fame as postmodern cultural transformations challenged modernist design values, and wider social and economic changes led to a withdrawal of government-funded institutional commissions. Yet his body of work is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be better known.

Following a path from Australia to the United States and Canada and back again, John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense examines his most important buildings and reveals how the internationalization of architecture during this period was an unexpectedly dispersed geographical phenomenon, following more complex flows and localized progressions than earlier modernist ideas that travelled from center to periphery, metropole to outpost. Andrews negotiated the advent of postmodernism not by ignoring it, but by cultivating approaches that this new era foregrounded—identity, history, place—within the formal vocabularies of modernism. As Andrews assumed wider public roles and took appointments that allowed him to shape architectural education, he influenced design culture beyond his own personal portfolio. This book presents his legacy traversing local and international scenes and exemplifying late-modern developments of architecture while offering both generational continuities and discontinuities with what came after.

John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense features essays from Paul Walker, Mary Lou Lobsinger, Peter Scriver and Antony Moulis, Philip Goad, and Paolo Scrivano, along with nearly 100 new photographs from visual artist Noritaka Minami of existing buildings designed by Andrews in North America and Australia.

[more]

front cover of Final Confession
Final Confession
The Unsolved Crimes of Phil Cresta
Brian P. Wallace
University Press of New England, 2013
Phil Cresta was no run-of-the-mill thief. Mastermind of the legendary Brink's armored truck robbery and a string of countless other high-stakes heists, he stole more than ten million dollars in escapades that often were breathtakingly daring and at times marvelously inventive. The robberies baffled both police and fellow outlaws for decades, and most of the crimes remain unsolved today. Now the open case files of these memorable thefts can be closed as Cresta himself provides the true story on how they were planned and carried out. Born in Boston's North End in 1928, Cresta was raised in an abusive household. He was sent to Concord Reformatory as a teenager, where he learned the craft of picking locks, a skill later honed during stays at the Charlestown and Walpole prisons in Massachusetts. Following the Brinks robbery in 1968, he was put on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, but eluded the law for five years, living in Chicago under an assumed name. After serving time at Walpole for the Brinks job, Cresta died penniless in Chicago in 1995. Yet shortly before his death, he revealed the full extent of his astonishing capers to coauthor Bill Crowley, a retired Boston police detective. Drawing from their extensive conversations, this riveting page-turner chronicles how Cresta, along with partners "Angelo" and "Tony," pulled off robberies of jewelers, rare coin dealers, furriers, and armored trucks, detailing the meticulous planning that marked his criminal career. Cresta's final accounting is brimming with vivid tales of betrayal, murder, and intrigue as well as a colorful cast of characters, including mob bosses, wise guys, informants, paid "ears," corrupt judges, a Hollywood starlet, and even the Mayor of Chicago. Filled with drama, tension, and humor, this absorbing saga takes the reader inside the dangerous yet exhilarating world of a life dedicated to crime.
[more]

front cover of Theatre Symposium, Vol. 20
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 20
Gods and Groundlings: Historical Theatrical Audiences
Edward Bert Wallace
University of Alabama Press, 2012
The audience is an integral part of performance and is in fact what separates a rehearsal from a performance. The relationship, however, between performers and the audience has evolved over time, which is one of the subjects addressed, along with the changing disposition of the audience itself and a number of other topics, in Gods and Groundlings, volume 20 of the annual journal Theatre Symposium. The essays in this volume discuss spectatorship in historical context, the role of the audience in the digital age, the early modern English
transvestite theatre, Annie Oakley and the disruption of Victorian audiences, and historical attempts to create ideal audiences. Edited by E. Bert Wallace, this latest publication from the largest regional theatre organization in the United States collects the most current scholarship on theatre history and theory.

Contributors To Volume 20
Susan Bennett / Jane Barnette / Becky Becker / Lisa Bernd / Evan
Bridenstine / Michael Jaros / Robert I. Lublin / Paulette Marty

[more]

front cover of Telling It Slant
Telling It Slant
Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990S
Mark Wallace
University of Alabama Press, 2001

The finest essays from the newest generation of critics and poet-critics are gathered together in this volume documenting the growth in readership and awareness of avant-garde poetries.

This collection demonstrates the breadth and openness of the field of avant-garde poetry by introducing a wide range of work in poetics, theory, and criticism from emerging writers. Examining the directions innovative poetry has taken since the emergence and success of the Language movement, the essays discuss new forms and the reorientation of older forms of poetry in order to embody present and ongoing involvements. The essays center around four themes: the relation between poetics and contemporary cultural issues; new directions for avant-garde practices; in-depth explorations of current poets and their predecessors; and innovative approaches to the essay form or individual poetics.

Diverging from the traditional, linear argumentative style of academic criticism, many of the essays in this collection instead find critical forms more subtly related to poetry. Viewed as a whole, the essays return to a number of shared issues, namely poetic form and the production of present-day poetry. While focusing on North American poetry, the collection does reference the larger world of contemporary poetics, including potential biases and omissions based on race and ethnicity.

This is cutting-edge criticism at its finest, essential reading for students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, of interest to anyone interested in contemporary American literature and poetry.

[more]

front cover of American Horrors
American Horrors
Essays on the Modern American Horror Film
Gregory A. Waller
University of Illinois Press, 1988
Since the release of Rosemary's Baby in 1968, the American horror film has become one of the most diverse, commercially successful, widely discussed, and culturally significant film genres. Drawing on a wide range of critical methods---from close textual readings and structuralist genre criticism to psychoanalytical, feminist, and ideological analyses---the authors examine individual films, directors, and subgenres.
In this collection of twelve essays, Gregory Waller balances detailed studies of both popular films (Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, and Halloween) and particularly problematic films (Don't Look Now and Eyes of Laura Mars) with discussions of such central thematic preoccupations as the genre's representation of violence and female victims, its reflexivity and playfulness, and its ongoing redefinition of the monstrous and the normal.
In addition, American Horrors includes a filmography of movies and telefilms and an annotated bibliography of books and articles about horror since 1968.
 
[more]

front cover of Barbecue Crossroads
Barbecue Crossroads
Notes and Recipes from a Southern Odyssey
Robb Walsh
University of Texas Press, 2013

In stories, recipes, and photographs, James Beard Award–winning writer Robb Walsh and acclaimed documentary photographer O. Rufus Lovett take us on a barbecue odyssey from East Texas to the Carolinas and back. In Barbecue Crossroads, we meet the pitmasters who still use old-fashioned wood-fired pits, and we sample some of their succulent pork shoulders, whole hogs, savory beef, sausage, mutton, and even some barbecued baloney. Recipes for these and the side dishes, sauces, and desserts that come with them are painstakingly recorded and tested.

But Barbecue Crossroads is more than a cookbook; it is a trip back to the roots of our oldest artisan food tradition and a look at how Southern culture is changing. Walsh and Lovett trace the lineage of Southern barbecue backwards through time as they travel across a part of the country where slow-cooked meat has long been part of everyday life. What they find is not one story, but many. They visit legendary joints that don’t live up to their reputations—and discover unknown places that deserve more attention. They tell us why the corporatizing of agriculture is making it difficult for pitmasters to afford hickory wood or find whole hogs that fit on a pit.

Walsh and Lovett also remind us of myriad ways that race weaves in and out of the barbecue story, from African American cooking techniques and recipes to the tastes of migrant farmworkers who ate their barbecue in meat markets, gas stations, and convenience stores because they weren’t welcome in restaurants. The authors also expose the ways that barbecue competitions and TV shows are undermining traditional barbecue culture. And they predict that the revival of the community barbecue tradition may well be its salvation.

[more]

front cover of Further News of Defeat
Further News of Defeat
Stories
Michael X. Wang
Autumn House Press, 2020
Steeped in a long history of violence and suffering, Michael X. Wang’s debut collection of short stories interrogates personal and political events set against the backdrop of China that are both real and perceived, imagined and speculative. Wang plunges us into the fictional Chinese village of Xinchun and beyond to explore themes of tradition, family, modernity, and immigration in a country grappling with its modern identity. Violence enters the pastoral when Chinese villagers are flung down a well by Japanese soldiers and forced to abandon their crops and families to work in the coal mines, a tugboat driver dredges up something more than garbage polluting the Suzhou River, and rural and urban landscapes are pitted against each other when young villagers are promised high-paying work in the city but face violent persecution instead. In this world where China has regressed back to its imperial days, we meet an emperor who demands total servitude and swift punishment for attempts at revolution, and we follow a father who immigrates to the United States for a better life and loses everything in a tragic accident—aside from his estranged son—with whom he stubbornly refuses to make amends. Further News of Defeat is rich with characters who have known struggle and defeat and who find themselves locked in pivotal moments of Chinese history—such as World War II and the Tiananmen Square massacre—as they face losses of the highest order and still find cause for revival. Further News of Defeat is the winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize.
 
[more]

front cover of A New Pair of Wings
A New Pair of Wings
Nancy Wang
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2016
This delightful children’s book, based on a story originally told by Delores Yngojo Kikuchi, Robert’s mother, recounts her tale of immigration to America. Young Delores finds resolve between East and West, through courage, imagination, and a little bit of myth to discover her “new pair of wings”. The book is beautifully illustrated by Brian Lei
[more]

front cover of AI for Status Monitoring of Utility Scale Batteries
AI for Status Monitoring of Utility Scale Batteries
Shunli Wang
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Batteries are a necessary part of a low-emission energy system, as they can store renewable electricity and assist the grid. Utility-scale batteries, with capacities of several to hundreds of MWh, are particularly important for condominiums, local grid nodes, and EV charging arrays. However, such batteries are expensive and need to be monitored and managed well to maintain capacity and reliability. Artificial intelligence offers a solution for effective monitoring and management of utility-scale batteries.
[more]

front cover of Real Sister
Real Sister
Stereotypes, Respectability, and Black Women in Reality TV
Jervette R. Ward
Rutgers University Press, 2015
From The Real Housewives of Atlanta to Flavor of Love, reality shows with predominantly black casts have often been criticized for their negative representation of African American women as loud, angry, and violent. Yet even as these programs appear to be rehashing old stereotypes of black women, the critiques of them are arguably problematic in their own way, as the notion of “respectability” has historically been used to police black women’s behaviors.
 
The first book of scholarship devoted to the issue of how black women are depicted on reality television, Real Sister offers an even-handed consideration of the genre. The book’s ten contributors—black female scholars from a variety of disciplines—provide a wide range of perspectives, while considering everything from Basketball Wives to Say Yes to the Dress. As regular viewers of reality television, these scholars are able to note ways in which the genre presents positive images of black womanhood, even as they catalog a litany of stereotypes about race, class, and gender that it tends to reinforce.
 
Rather than simply dismissing reality television as “trash,” this collection takes the genre seriously, as an important touchstone in ongoing cultural debates about what constitutes “trashiness” and “respectability.” Written in an accessible style that will appeal to reality TV fans both inside and outside of academia, Real Sister thus seeks to inspire a more nuanced, thoughtful conversation about the genre’s representations and their effects on the black community. 
[more]

front cover of The Environment for Aging
The Environment for Aging
Interpersonal, Social, and Spatial Contexts
Russell A. Ward
University of Alabama Press, 1988
The nature and consequences of aging depend on its environmental context, and the literature does not treat the various environmental dimensions in an integrated fashion. The authors introduce a general approach to the human ecosystem, highlighting theoretical and empirical issues necessary to an understanding of person-environment interaction related to aging. They then investigate in detail three aspects of the environment of older persons: residential and neighborhood, interpersonal support networks, and age-related attitudes. They give specific attention to the impact of the age composition of neighborhoods and interpersonal networks. The authors present findings from their interview survey of 1,185 community residents aged 60 and over. Major findings from the interviews include:
  1. Despite objective neighborhood problems, older persons express high neighborhood satisfaction. This partly reflects limited residential options, as well as a passive and vicarious spatial experience. The environment is experienced in diverse ways; however, urbanism and personal competence shape the nature and outcomes of person-environment interaction.
  2. Older persons have relatively robust interpersonal support networks. Perceived sufficiency of contact and support are more salient to morale than are more objective measures of interpersonal support.
  3. Although attitudes toward other older people are generally favorable, patterns of age identity reflect a detrimental view of aging. There is little evidence that socialization for aging or age-group solidarity make aging “easier” in this regard.
  4. Older persons exhibit moderate age homogeneity within their interpersonal networks, partly reflecting neighborhood age concentration. Contrary to the apparent benefits of planned age-segregated housing, age homogeneity in neighborhoods and networks does not contribute to well-being.
The authors examine three major themes in their concluding chapter; age itself does not “loom large” in the lives of these community residents, though age becomes salient under certain conditions; there is diversity in the implications of the environmental context for aging, in particular reflecting an “environmental docility” hypothesis; and aging must be viewed in interactional or transactional terms—older people “construct” the environment as a subjective entity.
 
[more]

front cover of Narrative Theory Unbound
Narrative Theory Unbound
Queer and Feminist Interventions
ROBYN R. WARHOL
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
Under the bold banner of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, editors Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser gather a diverse spectrum of queer and feminist challenges to the theory and interpretation of narrative. The first edited collection to bring feminist, queer, and narrative theories into direct conversation with one another, this anthology places gender and sexuality at the center of contemporary theorizing about the production, reception, forms, and functions of narrative texts.   
 
Through twenty-one essays prefaced by a cogent history of the field, Narrative Theory Unbound offers new perspectives on narrative discourse and its constituent elements; on intersectional approaches that recognize race, religion, and national culture as integral to understanding sexuality and gender; on queer temporalities; on cognitive research; and on lifewriting in graphic, print, and digital constellations. Exploring genres ranging from reality TV to fairy tales to classical fiction, contributors explore the thorny, contested relationships between feminist and queer theory, on the one hand, and between feminist/queer theory and contemporary narratologies, on the other. Rather than aiming for cohesiveness or conclusiveness, the collection stages open-ended debates designed to unbind the assumptions that have kept gender and sexuality on the periphery of narrative theory.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Remains of Old Latin, Volume II
Livius Andronicus. Naevius. Pacuvius. Accius
Eric Herbert Warmington
Harvard University Press

The Loeb edition of early Latin writings is in four volumes. The first three contain the extant work of seven poets and surviving portions of the Twelve Tables of Roman law. The fourth volume contains inscriptions on various materials (including coins), all written before 79 BCE.

Volume I. Q. Ennius (239–169) of Rudiae (Rugge), author of a great epic (Annales), tragedies and other plays, and satire and other works; Caecilius Statius (ca. 220–ca. 166), a Celt probably of Mediolanum (Milano) in N. Italy, author of comedies.

Volume II. L. Livius Andronicus (ca. 284–204) of Tarentum (Taranto), author of tragedies, comedies, a translation and paraphrase of Homer's Odyssey, and hymns; Cn. Naevius (ca. 270–ca. 200), probably of Rome, author of an epic on the 1st Punic War, comedies, tragedies, and historical plays; M. Pacuvius (ca. 220–ca. 131) of Brundisium (Brindisi), a painter and later an author of tragedies, a historical play and satire; L. Accius (170–ca. 85) of Pisaurum (Pisaro), author of tragedies, historical plays, stage history and practice, and some other works; fragments of tragedies by authors unnamed.

Volume III. C. Lucilius (180?–102/1) of Suessa Aurunca (Sessa), writer of satire; The Twelve Tables of Roman law, traditionally of 451–450.

Volume IV. Archaic Inscriptions: Epitaphs, dedicatory and honorary inscriptions, inscriptions on and concerning public works, on movable articles, on coins; laws and other documents.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Remains of Old Latin, Volume III
Lucilius. The Twelve Tables
Eric Herbert Warmington
Harvard University Press

A miscellany of satire and law.

This edition of early Latin writings is in four volumes. The first three contain the extant work of seven poets and surviving portions of the Twelve Tables of Roman law. The fourth volume contains inscriptions on various materials (including coins), all written before 79 BC.

Volume I. Q. Ennius (239–169) of Rudiae (Rugge), author of a great epic (Annales), tragedies and other plays, and satire and other works; Caecilius Statius (ca. 220–ca. 166), a Celt probably of Mediolanum (Milano) in N. Italy, author of comedies.

Volume II. L. Livius Andronicus (ca. 284–204) of Tarentum (Taranto), author of tragedies, comedies, a translation and paraphrase of Homer’s Odyssey, and hymns; Cn. Naevius (ca. 270–ca. 200), probably of Rome, author of an epic on the 1st Punic War, comedies, tragedies, and historical plays; M. Pacuvius (ca. 220–ca. 131) of Brundisium (Brindisi), a painter and later an author of tragedies, a historical play and satire; L. Accius (170–ca. 85) of Pisaurum (Pisaro), author of tragedies, historical plays, stage history and practice, and some other works; fragments of tragedies by authors unnamed.

Volume III. C. Lucilius (180?–102/1) of Suessa Aurunca (Sessa), writer of satire; The Twelve Tables of Roman law, traditionally of 451–450.

Volume IV. Archaic Inscriptions: Epitaphs, dedicatory and honorary inscriptions, inscriptions on and concerning public works, on movable articles, on coins; laws and other documents.

[more]

front cover of Secretly Inside
Secretly Inside
A Novel
Hans Warren
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
In the Dutch countryside the war seems far away. For most people, at least. But not for Ed, a Jew in Nazi-occupied Holland trying to find some safe sanctuary. Compelled to go into hiding in the rural province of Zeeland, he is taken in by a seemingly benevolent family of farmers. But, as Ed comes to realize, the Van 't Westeindes are not what they seem. Camiel, the son of the house, is still in mourning for his best friend, a German soldier who committed suicide the year before. And Camiel's fiery, unstable sister Mariete begins to nurse a growing unrequited passion for their young guest, just as Ed realizes his own attraction to Camiel. As time goes by, Ed is drawn into the domestic intrigues around him, and the farmhouse that had begun as his refuge slowly becomes his prison.
[more]

front cover of Forging Southeastern Identities
Forging Southeastern Identities
Social Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Folklore of the Mississippian to Early Historic South
Gregory A. Waselkov
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, a groundbreaking collection of ten essays, covers a broad expanse of time—from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries—and focuses on a common theme of identity. These essays represent the various methods used by esteemed scholars today to study how Native Americans in the distant past created new social identities when old ideas of the self were challenged by changes in circumstance or by historical contingencies.
 
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and folklorists working in the Southeast have always recognized the region’s social diversity; indeed, the central purpose of these disciplines is to study peoples overlooked by the mainstream. Yet the ability to define and trace the origins of a collective social identity—the means by which individuals or groups align themselves, always in contrast to others—has proven to be an elusive goal. Here, editors Gregory A. Waselkov and Marvin T. Smith champion the relational identification and categorical identification processes, taken from sociological theory, as effective analytical tools.
 
Taking up the challenge, the contributors have deployed an eclectic range of approaches to establish and inform an overarching theme of identity. Some investigate shell gorgets, textiles, shell trade, infrastructure, specific sites, or plant usage. Others focus on the edges of the Mississippian world or examine colonial encounters between Europeans and native peoples. A final chapter considers the adaptive malleability of historical legend in the telling and hearing of slave narratives.
[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
Mountain Dialogues
Frank Waters
Ohio University Press, 1999

“Mysticism is peculiar to the mountainbred,” Frank Waters once told an interviewer for Psychology Today. And in Mountain Dialogues, available for the first time in paperback, the mountainbred Waters proves it true. Ranging over such diverse subjects as silence, spirits, time, change, and the sacred mountains of the world, Waters sounds again and again the radiant, mystic theme of man’s inherent wholeness and his oneness with the cosmos.

Writing in Western American Literature, Charles L. Adams said, “In Mountain Dialogues, we see Frank Waters acknowledging his sources—major influences on a great American thinker and writer. Waters weaves together threads of these influences, adds his own thought, and presents us with a truly cosmic overview. This overview is thoroughly that of an American ‘Westerner’; it also is one that merits international consideration.”

And as the Bloomsbury Review wrote: “Mountain Dialogues is more than just a collection of personal essays. It is an ‘evolutionist’s handbook’ for the sons and daughters of the new West, a guide for those who would transcend the limitations of Western civilization.”

[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
A Frank Waters Reader
A Southwestern Life in Writing
Frank Waters
Ohio University Press, 2000

Over the course of his life, Frank Waters amassed a body of work that has few equals in the literature of the American West. Because his was a writing that touched every facet of the Western experience, his voice still echoes throughout that region’s literary world.

Swallow Press is especially proud to present this generous sampling of Frank Waters’s writings. A Frank Waters Reader encompasses the full range of his work and draws from both his nonfiction and his many novels. It stands as a testament to his singular achievement and proof of the talent that established him as the foremost writer in the Southwest.

This collection spanning forty years of writing provides an excellent introduction for the uninitiated as well as a retrospective for those already familiar with this giant talent. His gift for achieving a delicate balance among the many contrary forces at work in the land and the people who inhabit it is as true and enduring as the region that inspired him.

[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
A Frank Waters Reader
A Southwestern Life In Writing
Frank Waters
Ohio University Press, 2000

Over the course of his life, Frank Waters amassed a body of work that has few equals in the literature of the American West. Because his was a writing that touched every facet of the Western experience, his voice still echoes throughout that region’s literary world.

Swallow Press is especially proud to present this generous sampling of Frank Waters’s writings. A Frank Waters Reader encompasses the full range of his work and draws from both his nonfiction and his many novels. It stands as a testament to his singular achievement and proof of the talent that established him as the foremost writer in the Southwest.

This collection spanning forty years of writing provides an excellent introduction for the uninitiated as well as a retrospective for those already familiar with this giant talent. His gift for achieving a delicate balance among the many contrary forces at work in the land and the people who inhabit it is as true and enduring as the region that inspired him.

[more]

front cover of Co. Aytch, or a Side Show of the Big Show
Co. Aytch, or a Side Show of the Big Show
A New Edition Introduced and Annotated by Philip Leigh
Sam Watkins
Westholme Publishing, 2013
“Company H,” the Classic Civil War Memoir in a New Edition, Completely Annotated for the First Time and Illustrated with Twenty-Four Maps
Co. Aytch, or a Side Show of the Big Show is perhaps the finest memoir of an ordinary Confederate soldier. According to Margaret Mitchell, “a better book there never was.” Sam Watkins served in Company H of the First Tennessee Infantry for the duration of the Civil War. Remarkably, he survived some of the most intense battles of the war, including Shiloh, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Franklin. He was one of only seven of the original members of Company H when it surrendered in April 1865. Watkins’s memoir was written in the winter of 1882–83. The humor and depth of writing at times rises to a level resembling Mark Twain; thus, twenty-first-century readers can still discover the everlasting treasures of Private Sam Watkins’s story just as it was. It is this reason that excerpts were featured frequently in Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War. However, since most of Sam’s original readers—or some of their family members—actually lived through the Civil War, much of the context for the narrative was common knowledge. But what was once received history has gradually disappeared, and presently only specialists can fully understand and appreciate Sam’s tale.
The chief aim for this new annotated edition of Co. Aytch—the first of its kind—is to amplify the experience for today’s readers by providing the missing context. Over 240 annotations clarify the situational backgrounds, personalities, and terminology that might not be familiar to most readers. The annotations also identify and explain errors mostly resulting from Sam’s occasionally faulty memory or limited perspective. Similarly, twentyfour battlefield and war theater maps enable readers to track Sam’s combat participation as well as his journeys while marching with the army. Finally fifteen photographs and prints illustrate some of the battles, people, towns, buildings, tools of war, and ruins that Sam witnessed. As someone once cleverly observed, “It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong.” If nothing else, Sam’s memoir is a foot soldier’s view of the resulting horrors, heroics, and healing humor when war planning routinely goes awry.
[more]

front cover of Wild Mustard
Wild Mustard
New Voices from Vietnam
Charles Waugh
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Wild Mustard, an anthology of prizewinning short fiction by contemporary Vietnamese writers, throws into relief the transformations of self and place that followed Vietnam’s turn toward a market economy. In just three decades, since the 1986 policy known as doi moi (renovation) ended collectivization and integrated Vietnam into world markets, the country has transformed from one of the poorest and most isolated on earth into a dynamic global economy. The nineteen stories in this volume capture the kaleidoscopic experiences of Vietnam's youth, navigating between home and newly expanded horizons, as they seek new opportunities through migration, education, and integration not only into their nation but into the world.

In the tradition of the "Under 40" collections popularized by magazines such as the New Yorker and Granta, but with greater stakes and greater differences between the previous generation of writers and this new one, Wild Mustard seeks to change how North American readers think of Vietnam. Escaping the common fixation on the Vietnam War and its aftermath, these stories reflect the movement and dynamism of the young Vietnamese who locate themselves amid the transnational encounters and proliferating identities of a global economy.
 
[more]

front cover of Nanotechnologies
Nanotechnologies
Michel Wautelet
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009
How can single atoms be manipulated? Are the laws of physics still valid at the nanostructure scale? How could nanotechnologies help cure disease? What are the application fields of nanotechnologies and what ethical issues do they raise? These questions and many others are answered in this clearly presented, fascinating book.
[more]

front cover of The Ribbon of Green
The Ribbon of Green
Change in Riparian Vegetation in the Southwestern United States
Robert H. Webb
University of Arizona Press, 2007
Woody wetlands constitute a relatively small but extremely important part of the landscape in the southwestern United States. These riparian habitats support more than one-third of the region’s vascular plant species, are home to a variety of wildlife, and provide essential havens for dozens of migratory animals. Because of their limited size and disproportionately high biological value, the goal of protecting wetland environments frequently takes priority over nearly all other habitat types. In The Ribbon of Green, hydrologists Robert H. Webb, and Stanley A. Leake and botanist Raymond M. Turner examine the factors that affect the stability of woody riparian vegetation, one of the largest components of riparian areas. Such factors include the diversion of surface water, flood control, and the excessive use of groundwater. Combining repeat photography with historical context and information on species composition, they document more than 140 years of change. Contrary to the common assumption of widespread losses of this type of ecosystem, the authors show that vegetation has increased on many river reaches as a result of flood control, favorable climatic conditions, and large winter floods that encourage ecosystem disturbance, germination, and the establishment of species in newly generated openings. Bringing well-documented and accessible insights to the ecological study of wetlands, this book will influence our perception of change in riparian ecosystems and how riparian restoration is practiced in the Southwest, and it will serve as an important reference in courses on plant ecology, riparian ecology, and ecosystem management.
[more]

front cover of New Strategies for Wicked Problems
New Strategies for Wicked Problems
Science and Solutions in the 21st Century
Edward P. Weber
Oregon State University Press, 2017
According to Wikipedia: "A wicked problem is one that is impossible or difficult to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.  The term 'wicked' refers to such a problem's resistance to resolution, not to an evil nature.  Classic examples of wicked problems include economic, environmental, and political issues.”
 
We now live in a world full of wicked problems, most of them urgent challenges calling out for creative, democratic, and effective solutions.  Ed Weber, Denise Lach, and Brent Steele, of the Oregon State University School of Public Policy, solicited papers from a wide variety of accomplished scholars in the fields of science, politics, and policy with significant research experience to address this challenge.  The resultant collection focuses on major contemporary environmental and natural resource policy issues, and proposes an assortment of alternative problem-solving methodologies to tackle such problems. 
 
New Strategies for Wicked Problems will appeal to scholars, students, and decision-makers wrestling with wicked problems and “post-normal” science settings beyond simply environmental and natural resource-based issues.  It will provide much needed guidance to policymakers, citizens, public managers, and various stakeholders who are struggling with wicked problems in their professional lives.

Other Contributors:
Tanya Heikkila
Helen Ingram
Ann C. Keller
Bob Lackey
Anna Pakenham Stevenson
Christopher M. Weible
Daniel R. Williams
[more]

front cover of The Wrecking of La Salle's Ship Aimable and the Trial of Claude Aigron
The Wrecking of La Salle's Ship Aimable and the Trial of Claude Aigron
Robert S. Weddle
University of Texas Press, 2009

When Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, landed on the Texas coast in 1685, bent on founding a French colony, his enterprise was doomed to failure. Not only was he hundreds of miles from his intended landfall—the mouth of the Mississippi—but his supply ship, Aimable, was wrecked at the mouth of Matagorda Bay, leaving the colonists with scant provisions and little protection against local Indian tribes. In anger and disgust, he struck out at the ship's captain, Claude Aigron, accusing him of wrecking the vessel purposely and maliciously.

Captain Aigron and his crew escaped the doomed colony by returning to France on the warship that had escorted the expedition on its ocean crossing. Soon after reaching France, Aigron found himself defendant in a civil suit filed by two of his officers seeking recompense for lost salary and personal effects, and then imprisoned on order of King Louis XIV while La Salle's more serious accusations were being investigated.

In this book, Robert Weddle meticulously recounts, through court documents, the known history of Aigron and the Aimable, and finds that despite La Salle's fervent accusations, the facts of the case offer no clear indictment. The court documents, deftly translated by François Lagarde, reveal Captain Aigron's successful defense and illuminate the circumstances of the wreck with Aigron's testimony. Much is also revealed about the French legal system and how the sea laws of the period were applied through the French government's L'Ordonnance de la Marine.

[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
The American Search for Peace
Moral Reasoning, Religious Hope, and National Security
George S. Weigel Jr.
Georgetown University Press, 1991

Revolutions and aborted revolutions and bitter civil and "local" wars in the 1980s and since have raised new questions about national security, its definition, and its implementation. Nevertheless, a number of basic philosophical and political issues remain constant at a level deeper than tactical considerations. These are what eight accomplished philosophers, political scientists, Christian ethicists, and policymakers came together to discuss. They ask the fundamental and perduring questions of pacifism, war, intervention, and political negotiation. They focus on such problems as ascertaining the role of the churches in the quest for peace, defining "national interest" and "national purpose," and construing intervention in other that strictly unilateral terms.

[more]

front cover of Lamentation for 77,297 Victims
Lamentation for 77,297 Victims
Jirí Weil
Karolinum Press, 2020
“Smoke from nearby factories shrouds a countryside as flat as a table, a countryside stretching off to infinity. Covering it are the ashes of millions of dead. Scattered throughout are fine pieces of bone that ovens were not able to burn. When the wind comes, ashes rise to the heavens, bone fragments remain on the ground. And rain falls on the ashes, and rain turns them to good fertile soil, as befits the ashes of martyrs. And who can find the ashes of those from my native land, of whom there were 77,297? I gather some ashes with my hand, for only a hand can touch them, and I pour them into a linen sack, just as those who once left for a foreign country would gather their native soil so as never to forget, so as always to return to it.”

So begins Jiří Weil’s unforgettable prose poem, Lamentation for 77, 297 Victims, his literary monument to the Czech Jews killed during the Holocaust. A Czech-Jewish writer who worked at Prague’s Jewish Museum both during and after the Nazi Occupation—he survived the Holocaust by faking his own death and hiding out until the war had ended—Weil wrote Lamentation while he served as the museum’s senior librarian in the 1950s. This remarkable literary experiment presents a number of innovative approaches to writing about a horror many would deem indescribable, combining a narrative account of the Shoah with newspaper-style reportage on a handful of the lives ended by the Holocaust and quotes from the Hebrew Bible to create a specific and powerful portrait of loss and remembrance. Translated by David Lightfoot, Lamentation for 77,297 Victims is a startling and singular introduction to a writer whose works have been acclaimed by Philip Roth, Michiko Kakutani, and Siri Hustvedt.
 
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
A Measure of Malpractice
Medical Injury, Malpractice Litigation, and Patient Compensation
Paul C. Weiler
Harvard University Press, 1993

A Measure of Malpractice tells the story and presents the results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study, the largest and most comprehensive investigation ever undertaken of the performance of the medical malpractice system. The Harvard study was commissioned by the government of New York in 1986, in the midst of a malpractice crisis that had driven insurance premiums for surgeons and obstetricians in New York City to nearly $200,000 a year.

The Harvard-based team of doctors, lawyers, economists, and statisticians set out to investigate what was actually happening to patients in hospitals and to doctors in courtrooms, launching a far more informed debate about the future of medical liability in the 1990s. Careful analysis of the medical records of 30,000 patients hospitalized in 1984 showed that approximately one in twenty-five patients suffered a disabling medical injury, one quarter of these as a result of the negligence of a doctor or other provider. After assembling all the malpractice claims filed in New York State since 1975, the authors found that just one in eight patients who had been victims of negligence actually filed a malpractice claim, and more than two-thirds of these claims were filed by the wrong patients.

The study team then interviewed injured patients in the sample to discover the actual financial loss they had experienced: the key finding was that for roughly the same dollar amount now being spent on a tort system that compensates only a handful of victims, it would be possible to fund comprehensive disability insurance for all patients significantly disabled by a medical accident. The authors, who came to the project from very different perspectives about the present malpractice system, are now in agreement about the value of a new model of medical liability. Rather than merely tinker with the current system which fixes primary legal responsibility on individual doctors who can be proved medically negligent, legislatures should encourage health care organizations to take responsibility for the financial losses of all patients injured in their care.

[more]

front cover of Pow! Right in the Eye!
Pow! Right in the Eye!
Thirty Years behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting
Berthe Weill
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Memoir of a provocative Parisian art dealer at the heart of the 20th-century art world, available in English for the first time.
  
Berthe Weill, a formidable Parisian dealer, was born into a Jewish family of very modest means. One of the first female gallerists in the business, she first opened the Galerie B. Weill in the heart of Paris’s art gallery district in 1901, holding innumerable exhibitions over nearly forty years. Written out of art history for decades, Weill has only recently regained the recognition she deserves.
 
Under five feet tall and bespectacled, Weill was beloved by the artists she supported, and she rejected the exploitative business practices common among art dealers. Despite being a self-proclaimed “terrible businesswoman,” Weill kept her gallery open for four decades, defying the rising tide of antisemitism before Germany’s occupation of France. By the time of her death in 1951, Weill had promoted more than three hundred artists—including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, and Suzanne Valadon—many of whom were women and nearly all young and unknown when she first exhibited them.
 
Pow! Right in the Eye! makes Weill’s provocative 1933 memoir finally available to English readers, offering rare insights into the Parisian avant-garde and a lively inside account of the development of the modern art market.
 
[more]

front cover of Investing in the Disadvantaged
Investing in the Disadvantaged
Assessing the Benefits and Costs of Social Policies
David L. Weimer
Georgetown University Press, 2009

With budgets squeezed at every level of government, cost-benefit analysis (CBA) holds outstanding potential for assessing the efficiency of many programs. In this first book to address the application of CBA to social policy, experts examine ten of the most important policy domains: early childhood development, elementary and secondary schools, health care for the disadvantaged, mental illness, substance abuse and addiction, juvenile crime, prisoner reentry programs, housing assistance, work-incentive programs for the unemployed and employers, and welfare-to-work interventions. Each contributor discusses the applicability of CBA to actual programs, describing both proven and promising examples.

The editors provide an introduction to cost-benefit analysis, assess the programs described, and propose a research agenda for promoting its more widespread application in social policy. Investing in the Disadvantaged considers how to face America’s most urgent social needs with shrinking resources, showing how CBA can be used to inform policy choices that produce social value.

[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
The Muckrakers
Arthur Weinberg
University of Illinois Press, 1964
As the twentieth century opened, Americans were jolted out of their laissez-faire complacency by detailed exposures, in journalism and fiction, of the corruption underlying the country's greatest institutions. This rude awakening was the work of the muckrakers, as Theodore Roosevelt christened these press agents for reform.
 
From 1902, when it latched onto such mass circulation magazines as Collier's and McClure's, until it merged into the Progressive movement in 1912, muckraking relentlessly pricked the nation's social conscience by exposing the abuses of industry and politics. Ranging in tone from the scholarly to the sensational, muckraking articles attacked food adulteration, unscrupulous insurance practices, fraudulent claims for patent medicines, and links between government and vice. When muckrakers raised their voices against child labor, graft, monopoly, unsafe mill conditions, and the white slave trade of poor immigrant girls, they found a receptive audience. "I aimed at the public's heart," wrote Upton Sinclair about The Jungle, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
 
Gathering the most significant pieces published during the heyday of the muckraking movement, The Muckrakers brings vividly to life this unique era of exposure and self-examination. For each article, Arthur and Lila Weinberg provide concise commentary on the background of its subject and the specific and long-range repercussions of its publication. The volume features the work of both journalists and fiction writers, including Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, Ray Stannard Baker, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Thomas W. Lawson, Charles Edward Russell, and Mark Sullivan.
 
Eloquent and uncompromising, the muckrakers shocked America from a state of lethargy into Progressive reform. This generous volume vividly captures the urgency of their quest.
 
[more]

front cover of Music and Cultural Rights
Music and Cultural Rights
Andrew N. Weintraub
University of Illinois Press, 2009
Framing timely and pressing questions concerning music and cultural rights, this collection illustrates the ways in which music--as a cultural practice, a commercial product, and an aesthetic form--has become enmeshed in debates about human rights, international law, and struggles for social justice. The essays in this volume examine how interpretations of cultural rights vary across societies; how definitions of rights have evolved; and how rights have been invoked in relation to social struggles over cultural access, use, representation, and ownership. The individual case studies, many of them based on ethnographic field research, demonstrate how musical aspects of cultural rights play out in specific cultural contexts, including the Philippines, China, Hawaii, Peru, Ukraine, and Brazil.

Contributors are Nimrod Baranovitch, Adriana Helbig, Javier F. Leon, Ana María Ochoa, Silvia Ramos, Helen Rees, Felicia Sandler, Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, Ricardo D. Trimillos, Andrew N. Weintraub, and Bell Yung.

[more]

logo for University of Iowa Press
Genes And Human Self-Knowledge
Reflections On Modern Genetics
Robert F. Weir
University of Iowa Press, 1994

Contemporary developments in human genetics are profoundly meaningful, both for the rapidity of scientific discoveries and for their personal and social implications. The Human Genome Project, a worldwide effort to map the 50,000 to 100,000 genes making up the human blueprint, is creating new ways of understanding ourselves as individuals, as parents, as members of a family, an ethnic group, a species. Almost every day yet another medical detective finds a genetic clue to the long-running mystery of human identity.

In 1992, the University of Iowa Humanities Symposium provided a public forum to examine the issues—moral, conceptual, legal, and practical—in modern genetics that are crucial to all of us. This strong, challenging volume is a collection of the major essays presented by historians, philosophers, and other academic humanists to a multidisciplinary audience of molecular and clinical geneticists, genetic counselors, humanists, and members of the public. The essays explore the historical background, philosophical implications, and ethical issues related to the Human Genome Project as well as other developments in modern genetics.

The questions raised in these essays are dramatic and troubling. What kind of knowledge is being produced by molecular geneticists? Do individual human genomes differ significantly from each other? How much do females and males differ from each other at the molecular level? Is there any genetic basis for distinguishing among racial or ethical groups? Can current practices in genetics counseling be compared to the earlier eugenics movement? Will current research lead to updated views on genetic “normalcy” or even “superiority”?

[more]

front cover of Listen Again
Listen Again
A Momentary History of Pop Music
Eric Weisbard
Duke University Press, 2007
Arguing that pop music turns on moments rather than movements, the essays in Listen Again pinpoint magic moments from a century of pop eclecticism, looking at artists who fall between genre lines, songs that sponge up influences from everywhere, and studio accidents with unforeseen consequences. Listen Again collects some of the finest presentations from the celebrated Experience Music Project Pop Conference, where journalists, musicians, academics, and other culturemongers come together once each year to stretch the boundaries of pop music culture, criticism, and scholarship.

Building a history of pop music out of unexpected instances, critics and musicians delve into topics from the early-twentieth-century black performer Bert Williams’s use of blackface, to the invention of the Delta blues category by a forgotten record collector named James McKune, to an ER cast member’s performance as the Germs’ front man Darby Crash at a Germs reunion show. Cuban music historian Ned Sublette zeroes in on the signature riff of the garage-band staple “Louie, Louie.” David Thomas of the pioneering punk band Pere Ubu honors one of his forebears: Ghoulardi, a late-night monster-movie host on Cleveland-area TV in the 1960s. Benjamin Melendez discusses playing in a band, the Ghetto Brothers, that Latinized the Beatles, while leading a South Bronx gang, also called the Ghetto Brothers. Michaelangelo Matos traces the lineage of the hip-hop sample “Apache” to a Burt Lancaster film. Whether reflecting on the ringing freedom of an E chord or the significance of Bill Tate, who performed once in 1981 as Buddy Holocaust and was never heard from again, the essays reveal why Robert Christgau, a founder of rock criticism, has called the EMP Pop Conference “the best thing that’s ever happened to serious consideration of pop music.”

Contributors. David Brackett, Franklin Bruno, Daphne Carr, Henry Chalfant, Jeff Chang, Drew Daniel, Robert Fink, Holly George-Warren, Lavinia Greenlaw, Marybeth Hamilton, Jason King, Josh Kun, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Greil Marcus, Michaelangelo Matos, Benjamin Melendez, Mark Anthony Neal, Ned Sublette, David Thomas, Steve Waksman, Eric Weisbard

[more]

front cover of 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology
50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology
Gail Weiss
Northwestern University Press, 2020

Phenomenology, the philosophical method that seeks to uncover the taken-for-granted presuppositions, habits, and norms that structure everyday experience, is increasingly framed by ethical and political concerns. Critical phenomenology foregrounds experiences of marginalization, oppression, and power in order to identify and transform common experiences of injustice that render “the familiar” a site of oppression for many. In Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, leading scholars present fresh readings of classic phenomenological topics and introduce newer concepts developed by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, disability theorists, and queer and trans theorists that capture aspects of lived experience that have traditionally been neglected. By centering historically marginalized perspectives, the chapters in this book breathe new life into the phenomenological tradition and reveal its ethical, social, and political promise. This volume will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research in continental philosophy; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race theory; disability studies; cultural studies; and critical theory more generally.

[more]

front cover of Global Homophobia
Global Homophobia
States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression
Meredith L. Weiss
University of Illinois Press, 2013
While homophobia is commonly characterized as individual and personal prejudice, this collection of essays instead explores homophobia as a transnational political phenomenon. Editors Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia theorize homophobia as a distinct configuration of repressive state-sponsored policies and practices with their own causes, explanations, and effects on how sexualities are understood and experienced in a variety of national contexts. The essays cover a broad range of geographic cases, including France, Ecuador, Iran, Lebanon, Poland, Singapore, and the United States.

Combining rich empirical analysis with theoretical synthesis, these studies examine how homophobia travels across complex and ambiguous transnational networks, how it achieves and exerts decisive power, and how it shapes the collective identities and strategies of those groups it targets. The first comparative volume to focus specifically on the global diffusion of homophobia and its implications for an emerging worldwide LGBT movement, Global Homophobia opens new avenues of debate and dialogue for scholars, students, and activists.

Contributors are Mark Blasius, Michael J. Bosia, David K. Johnson, Kapya J. Kaoma, Christine (Cricket) Keating, Katarzyna Korycki, Amy Lind, Abouzar Nasirzadeh, Conor O'Dwyer, Meredith L. Weiss, and Sami Zeidan.

[more]

front cover of Your Place in the Multiverse
Your Place in the Multiverse
Jean Lowe
John C. Welchman
University Press of Colorado, 2021
American artist Jean Lowe’s work revolves around the intersection of art history, popular culture, environmentalism, commerce, and politics. Your Place in the Multiverse: Jean Lowe is a survey of her work drawn from the past seventeen years featuring many of her most important installations. Lowe employs wit and satire to create work that is both entertaining and seductive as well as intellectually provocative. Lowe is an American pop/conceptual multimedia artist whose work carefully and humorously unpacks the ironies and challenges of our 21st century culture. This will be the first museum exhibition of Lowe’s work since 2000 and the first publication on her work to include scholarly essays by two art historians.

Dating from 2003-2020, the exhibition consists of fourteen separate installations: Empire Style, 2003; Dr’s Notes, 2004; Baby Grand, 2005; Love for Sale and Look 20 Years Younger, 2008-11; Discount Barn, 2008-2020; Bookshelf Prints, 2013;  Last Call, 2013-20; Posters and Pallet, 2014; Last Call, 2017-21, Forgotten Corner, 2019; Garden Carpet, 2019; Art and About with Bill Mackelry, 2019-2020, Town Crier (Self-Portrait as Analog), 2020, and POW!, 2021. Lowe’s installations are primarily comprised of unpretentious media such as papier-mâché and paint, which are coupled with a sophisticated and literary use of language, and a loose painterly style. Room-sized and incorporating artist made furniture, rugs, and even pianos, these beautifully-staged installations are often overwhelming, playing both on sensory overload and the irony of abundance as presented daily in our consumer culture. Through her work Lowe references European art, especially German Baroque and French Empire style, for their exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style. By conflating the French Empire style with the stylistics of American consumer culture, and big box store marketing, Lowe offers up a striking, thoughtful and revealing comparison of cultural contexts.

POW! (2020) and Art and About with Bill Mackelry (2019-2020), shown for the first time in this exhibition, look at the imbalance of male to female power in the art-world. Art and About with Bill Mackelry is a video piece in which Lowe stars as a mock male interviewer named Bill Mackelry, who interviews the artist Jean Lowe on a visual arts talk show. The installation POW! will be filled with ersatz portraits of women as fierce, crazy hags by painters such as Picasso, Willem De Kooning, and Frances Bacon painted directly on the wall.

Your Place in the Multiverse: Jean Lowe is organized by Executive Director and Chief Curator Katie Lee-Koven for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art. This fully illustrated accompanying publication, of the same title, will be the first to include art historical essays with in-depth analysis of Lowe’s work written by USU Art History Assistant Professor Marissa Vigneault and John C. Welchman, professor of Art History and Critical Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
 
[more]

front cover of Baring Witness
Baring Witness
36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage
Holly Welker
University of Illinois Press, 2016
In Baring Witness, Holly Welker and thirty-six Mormon women write about devotion and love and luck, about the wonder of discovery, and about the journeys, both thorny and magical, to humor, grace, and contentment. They speak to a diversity of life experiences: what happens when one partner rejects Church teachings; marrying outside one's faith; the pain of divorce and widowhood; the horrors of spousal abuse; the hard journey from visions of an idealized marriage to the everyday truth; sexuality within Mormon marriage; how the pressure to find a husband shapes young women's actions and sense of self; and the ways Mormon belief and culture can influence second marriages and same-sex unions. The result is an unflinching look at the earthly realities of an institution central to Mormon life.
[more]

front cover of Lorado Taft
Lorado Taft
The Chicago Years
Allen Stuart Weller
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Sculptor Lorado Taft helped build Chicago's worldwide reputation as the epicenter of the City Beautiful Movement. In this new biography, art historian Allen Stuart Weller picks up where his earlier book Lorado in Paris left off, drawing on the sculptor's papers to generate a fascinating account of the most productive and influential years of Taft's long career.

Returning to Chicago from France, Taft established a bustling studio and began a twenty-one-year career as an instructor at the Art Institute, succeeded by three decades as head of the Midway Studios at the University of Chicago. This triumphant era included ephemeral sculpture for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; a prolific turn-of-the-century period marked by the gold-medal-winning The Solitude of the Soul; the 1913 Fountain of the Great Lakes; the 1929 Alma Mater at the University of Illinois; and large-scale projects such as his ambitious program for Chicago's Midway with the monumental Fountain of Time. In addition, the book charts Taft's mentoring of women artists, including the so-called White Rabbits at the World's Fair, many of whom went on to achieve artistic success.

Lavishly illustrated with color images of Taft's most celebrated works, Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years completes the first major study of a great American artist.

[more]

front cover of New Downtown Now
New Downtown Now
An Anthology Of New Theater From Downtown New York
Mac Wellman
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
At a time when most serious drama being written and produced for the American stage aspires only to mainstream acceptance and high-toned mediocrity, an innovative new generation of playwrights based in New York City has emerged, crafting works that challenge and undermine the conventional structure, language, and characterization of commercial theater while rejecting outdated notions of the avant-garde. New Downtown Now brings together ten new works that exemplify the playfulness, excitement, and possibilities of the theater. Characterized by fragmenting structure, hypnotic rhythms, kaleido-scopic imagery, unpredictable characters, and lyrical language, these plays resemble puzzles from which the writers are teasing revelations. Though disparate in subject matter and style, with characters ranging from a sushi chef to a soldier and settings from a taxicab to a live television broadcast, these highly original plays share a commitment to formal experimentation that places them beyond the psychological clichés of the majority and the cold condescension of postmodernism. The anthology includes Interim by Barbara Cassidy; Tragedy: a tragedy by Will Eno; Nine Come by Elana Greenfield; Shufu-Sachiko and Enoshima Island by Madelyn Kent; The Appeal by Young Jean Lee; The Vomit Talk of Ghosts by Kevin Oakes; Ajax (por nobody) by Alice Tuan; Apparition, an uneasy play of the underknown by Anne Washburn; Demon Baby by Erin Courtney.Mac Wellman is the author of numerous plays and the recipient of three Obie awards, most recently in 2003 for lifetime achievement. He is professor of playwriting at Brooklyn College. Young Jean Lee is a playwright and director, and member of the Obie award-winning company 13P. Jeffrey M. Jones is a playwright and curator of the Obie award-winning Little Theater at Tonic in New York.
[more]

front cover of Warring over Valor
Warring over Valor
How Race and Gender Shaped American Military Heroism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Simon Wendt
Rutgers University Press, 2019
By focusing on how the idea of heroism on the battlefield helped construct, perpetuate, and challenge racial and gender hierarchies in the United States between World War I and the present, Warring over Valor provides fresh perspectives on the history of American military heroism. The book offers two major insights into the history of military heroism. First, it reveals a precarious ambiguity in the efforts of minorities such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, women, and gay men to be recognized as heroic soldiers. Paradoxically, America’s heroism discourse allowed them to press their case for full membership in the nation, but doing so simultaneously validated the dichotomous interpretations of race and gender they repudiated. The ambiguous role of marginalized groups in war-related hero-making processes also testifies to this volume’s second general insight: the durability and tenacity of the masculine warrior hero in U.S. society and culture. Warring over Valor bridges a gap in the historiography of heroism and military affairs. 
[more]

front cover of Natural Connections
Natural Connections
Perspectives In Community-Based Conservation
David Western
Island Press, 1994

Both realism and justice demand that efforts to conserve biological diversity address human needs as well. The most promising hope of accomplishing such a goal lies in locally based conservation efforts -- an approach that seeks ways to make local communities the beneficiaries and custodians of conservation efforts.

Natural Connections focuses on rural societies and the conservation of biodiversity in rural areas. It represents the first systematic analysis of locally based efforts, and includes a comprehensive examination of cases from around the world where the community-based approach is used. The book provides:

  • an overview of community-based conservation in the context of the debate over sustainable development, poverty, and environmental decline
  • case studies from the developed and developing worlds -- Indonesia, Peru, Australia, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom -- that present detailed examples of the locally based approach to conservation
  • a review of the principal issues arising from community-based programs
  • an agenda for future action
[more]

front cover of Directing
Directing
Virginia Wright Wexman
Rutgers University Press, 2017
When a film is acclaimed, the director usually gets the lion’s share of the credit. Yet the movie director’s job—especially the collaborations and compromises it involves—remains little understood. 

The latest volume in the Behind the Silver Screen series, this collection provides the first comprehensive overview of how directing, as both an art and profession, has evolved in tandem with changing film industry practices. Each chapter is written by an expert on a different period of Hollywood, from the silent film era to today’s digital filmmaking, providing in-depth examinations of key trends like the emergence of independent production after World War II and the rise of auteurism in the 1970s. Challenging the myth of the lone director, these studies demonstrate how directors work with a multitude of other talented creative professionals, including actors, writers, producers, editors, and cinematographers.   

Directing examines a diverse range of classic and contemporary directors, including Orson Welles, Tim Burton, Cecil B. DeMille, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee, and Ida Lupino, offering a rich composite picture of how they have negotiated industry constraints, utilized new technologies, and harnessed the creative contributions of their many collaborators throughout a century of Hollywood filmmaking.  
[more]

front cover of The Next Conservatism
The Next Conservatism
Paul M. Weyrich
St. Augustine's Press, 2009

Since November’s election, conservative columnists have filled the op-ed pages with calls for a new conservative agenda. In The Next Conservatism, two of the conservative movement’s best-known thinkers, Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind, offer exactly that. More, they offer a new kind of conservative agenda, one that reaches far beyond politics to grapple with the sources of our nation’s cultural decay.
     The Next Conservatism recognizes that culture is more powerful than politics. Nevertheless, it offers an engaging menu of political reforms, all under the rubric of “Restore the Republic!” No enthusiasts of Imperial America at home or abroad, Weyrich and Lind seek limited government, jealous guardianship of civil liberties, and a Washington liberated from the power of the New Class, the interests that feed off our nation’s decay. To these frequent conservative themes, Weyrich and Lind offer something new: a warning of a general crisis of legitimacy of the state itself, which can lead to a Hobbesian state of anarchy. How might we save the state while avoiding the jaws of Leviathan? The Next Conservatism offers innovative ways to thread that needle.
    Meanwhile, what of America’s culture? Did its decay over the past half-century “just happen”? Weyrich and Lind argue no; rather, much of our degradation was deliberate, the work of the poisonous ideology of cultural Marxism, aka “Political Correctness.” The Next Conservatism takes the reader on a fascinating historical tour of the origins of Political Correctness in the infamous Frankfurt School, a gathering of heretical Marxists whose goal from the outset was the destruction of Western culture.
     Weyrich and Lind then proceed to “deconstruct” the left’s program for America, debunking Feminism, “racism,” and environmentalism along the way. Reflecting the thought of Russell Kirk, The Next Conservatism condemns ideologies left and right, calling instead for a return to traditional ways of living, ways that reflect wisdom accumulated generation by generation. Only thus, they argue, can conservatives win a culture war many regard as hopelessly lost.
     Old ways, in turn, lead to a Next Conservatism appropriate for hard times. Virtue, Weyrich and Lind offer, is to be found in modest living, not conspicuous consumption. The Next Conservative agenda rejects environmentalism but includes conservation, the return of the family farm, New Urbanism and the revival of such ‘oldies but goodies” as streetcars and passenger trains. A new theme, Retroculture, sums up a conservatism that recognizes that what worked in the past can work again today, and in the future as well. Our ancestors were no fools, the authors suggest, and “Back to the Future!” can serve as a powerful conservative rallying cry.
     Having laid the political and cultural groundwork, The Next Conservatism then turns to conservative governance. In foreign policy, the authors call for minimizing foreign entanglements, though with a strong national defense and a military reform to adapt to face Fourth Generation warfare rather than the Second Generation America adheres to. For the economy, the authors call for repairing and expanding our national infrastructure, sound money, and protecting American industry, seeing labor as a potential ally. In both national security and economic security, the authors insist that good governance include moral security; drawing from the New Urbanism, they offer a “moral transect” that allows everyone to do what he wants, but not always where he wants. The public square, they suggest, should be safe for families.
     Respecting the careful limits on government power a restored republic would embody, The Next Conservatism calls for redeeming America not through legislation but through a new conservative movement. Unlike the old movement, the next conservative movement would be a league of people who pledged to live their lives by the old rules. While conservatives would remain engaged in politics, they would rely on a vastly more powerful force of example, the examples of lives lived well in traditional ways. This next conservative movement would appeal far beyond the ranks of political conservatives, to all Americans who know that something has gone tragically wrong in the life of our nation.
     The Next Conservatism offers a vision of vast sweep, far beyond anything coming out of Washington. At a time when most Americans find life growing more difficult, it proposes a path to a new America that is also the old America, the good, comfortable America we had and have lost.


 

[more]

front cover of Voting the Gender Gap
Voting the Gender Gap
Lois Duke Whitaker
University of Illinois Press, 2007

This book concentrates on the gender gap in voting--the difference in the proportion of women and men voting for the same candidate. Evident in every presidential election since 1980, this polling phenomenon reached a high of 11 percentage points in the 1996 election. The contributors discuss the history, complexity, and ways of analyzing the gender gap; the gender gap in relation to partisanship; motherhood, ethnicity, and the impact of parental status on the gender gap; and the gender gap in races involving female candidates. Voting the Gender Gap analyzes trends in voting while probing how women's political empowerment and gender affect American politics and the electoral process.

Contributors are Susan J. Carroll, Erin Cassese, Cal Clark, Janet M. Clark, M. Margaret Conway, Kathleen A. Dolan, Laurel Elder, Kathleen A. Frankovic, Steven Greene, Leonie Huddy, Mary-Kate Lizotte, Barbara Norrander, Margie Omero, and Lois Duke Whitaker.

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Poor Dancer's Almanac
Managing Life & Work in the Performing Arts
David R. White
Duke University Press, 1993
Combining how-to information with voices of working artists, Poor Dancer's Almanac is an essential resource tool and source of inspiration for all independent artists—choreographers, performance artists, dancers producers, managers. Created in 1975 and revised again in 1984 this handbook has come to serve as one of the most crucial references for the arts community. In the most up-to-date and comprehensive edition yet, a broad range of issues affecting performers and producers is addressed, interwoven with newly added, more personal contributions from major figures in the performance world.
Organized and compiled by Dance Theater Workshop in New York and authored by more than fifty leading professionals in the field, Poor Dancer's Almanac offers in-depth discussions of everything from personal livelihood to professional career development, from medical care, housing, and unemployment insurance to management, touring, and legal issues. Each chapter is followed by an appendix containing extensive and varied listings, giving names and addresses for finding internship programs, videotaping, flooring, grant-writing, and reference publications. Although centered on New York the Almanac includes lists of resources and contacts for many other states—California, Washington D.C, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and Ohio. An entirely new section has been added dealing with health issues and the crisis of AIDS.
In personal anecdotes and essays various performers offer their own insights and stories—both of struggles and of successes—to bring to life the practical realities of working in the arts. We hear from Merce Cunningham, Eric Bogosian, Karen Finley, Paul Zaloom, and Bill T. Jones, among others. Illustrated with original drawings by Janie Geiser, this thoroughly revised and updated edition of the Poor Dancer's Almanac will continue to serve as one of the leading sources for those concerned with managing life and work in the performing arts.
[more]

front cover of Best Backpacking Trips in California and Nevada
Best Backpacking Trips in California and Nevada
Mike White
University of Nevada Press, 2015
The American West is home to some of the best backpacking trips in the world, and within California and Nevada are several outstanding destination trails. Hikers from all over the country, and around the world, travel to this area every season to undertake some of these classic trips of a lifetime and enjoy the breathtaking scenery. Best Backpacking Trips in California and Nevada was written to help the accomplished hiker through the entire process of planning a multiday excursion. The book covers all aspects of the trip, from traveling to the area to successfully fulfilling the dream of backpacking in one of the most beautiful regions in the West.

The guide includes thirteen detailed trail descriptions, along with information on additional resources, governing agencies, and permits and fees. It also provides listings of the nearest airports, outdoor retailers, campgrounds, transportation, and amenities and attractions. Accompanying the specific information on each trip are captivating historical vignettes and entertaining personal essays, enhancing the reader’s understanding of the area. Whether journeying from near or far, Best Backpacking Trips of California and Nevada is the most complete resource for turning a dream trip into reality.
[more]

front cover of Best Backpacking Trips in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado
Best Backpacking Trips in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado
Mike White
University Press of Colorado, 2019

Best Backpacking Trips in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado provides everything you need to know to organize and execute the best backpacking trips in the Mountain West. Mike White and Douglas Lorain, who have walked every mile of the trails described inside, take readers and hikers into some of the wildest and most scenic backcountry landscapes in the nation and help them design the ultimate trip.

Focusing on one-week excursions, the book offers details on all the aspects of trip planning—trail narratives, technical data, maps, gear, food, information on regulations and permits, and more. But it is more than a basic guidebook. Trip information is enriched by valuable and interesting sidebars on history and ecology that will increase appreciation for these natural areas and the people who were instrumental in their discovery or protection.

In Best Backpacking Trips in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, White and Lorain pass on their knowledge of quality hikes, planning and preparation, and the unique satisfaction of multi-day backpacking. This guide, put into practice, will result in the trip of a lifetime.

[more]

front cover of Best Backpacking Trips in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico
Best Backpacking Trips in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico
Mike White
University of Nevada Press, 2016

This is the second book in a series of detailed guidebooks covering all the best “life-list” backpacking vacations in the spectacular backcountry of the American West. This new volume specifically covers the best such adventures in the states of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Every conceivable aspect of trip planning is covered in the guide, including maps and descriptions of the trail, where to locate the nearest airport, other area attractions that shouldn’t be missed, and guide services that are available. A noteworthy feature of the book is the individual vignettes that give insight into the historical significance of many of the trails. Also unique are the interesting and humorous personal accounts that the authors share from their personal experiences hiking these routes. Backpackers will find a wide range of outstanding trips, from high mountain adventures to some of the world’s best lower-elevation canyon hikes. Best Backpacking Trips in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico provides an extensive choice of terrific expeditions.

[more]

front cover of Yellowstone’s Wildlife in Transition
Yellowstone’s Wildlife in Transition
P. J. White
Harvard University Press, 2013

The world's first national park, Yellowstone is a symbol of nature's enduring majesty and the paradigm of protected areas across the globe. But Yellowstone is constantly changing. How we understand and respond to events that are putting species under stress, say the authors of Yellowstone's Wildlife in Transition, will determine the future of ecosystems that were millions of years in the making. With a foreword by the renowned naturalist E. O. Wilson, this is the most comprehensive survey of research on North America's flagship national park available today.

Marshaling the expertise of over thirty contributors, Yellowstone's Wildlife in Transition examines the diverse changes to the park's ecology in recent decades. Since its creation in the 1870s, the priorities governing Yellowstone have evolved, from intensive management designed to protect and propagate depleted large-bodied mammals to an approach focused on restoration and preservation of ecological processes. Recognizing the importance of natural occurrences such as fires and predation, this more ecologically informed oversight has achieved notable successes, including the recovery of threatened native species of wolves, bald eagles, and grizzly bears.

Nevertheless, these experts detect worrying signs of a system under strain. They identify three overriding stressors: invasive species, private-sector development of unprotected lands, and a warming climate. Their concluding recommendations will shape the twenty-first-century discussion over how to confront these challenges, not only in American parks but for conservation areas worldwide. Highly readable and fully illustrated, Yellowstone's Wildlife in Transition will be welcomed by ecologists and nature enthusiasts alike.

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Developments in Central and East European Politics 4
Stephen White
Duke University Press
The face of Central and Eastern Europe has been dramatically transformed since the collapse of communism. The region faces new challenges, including the needs to find a balance between effective leadership and accountability and to reverse the economic decline of the late communist years. Addressing these concerns and others, Developments in Central and East European Politics 4 brings together specially commissioned chapters by leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic.

The chapters, all of which are new to this edition, focus on key features of the political systems that have emerged following the transition to postcommunist rule and the enlargement of the European Union through 2006. Full attention is given to the pattern of events in individual nations, but the main emphasis is on the framework of politics across the region—constitutions, leadership, parliaments, parties, and electoral systems—and the process of politics, as it is revealed in political participation, civil society, economic change, and the quality of democratic government within and beyond the region.

Clearly written and well supported with references and suggestions for further reading, Developments in Central and East European Politics 4 is the ideal guide to the process of change in a group of states that were formerly modeled on the Soviet Union but are now a distinctive and varied presence within a continent that has been redefining its boundaries, its values, its economic systems, and its international allegiances.

Contributors. Judy Batt, Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Sarah Birch, Heather Grabbe, Tim Haughton, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Petr Kopecký, Paul G. Lewis, Frances Millard, Cas Mudde, D. Mario Nuti, Mark Pittaway, Ray Taras, Stephen White, Andrew Wilson, Kataryna Wolczuk

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Developments in Central and East European Politics 4
Stephen White
Duke University Press
The face of Central and Eastern Europe has been dramatically transformed since the collapse of communism. The region faces new challenges, including the needs to find a balance between effective leadership and accountability and to reverse the economic decline of the late communist years. Addressing these concerns and others, Developments in Central and East European Politics 4 brings together specially commissioned chapters by leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic.

The chapters, all of which are new to this edition, focus on key features of the political systems that have emerged following the transition to postcommunist rule and the enlargement of the European Union through 2006. Full attention is given to the pattern of events in individual nations, but the main emphasis is on the framework of politics across the region—constitutions, leadership, parliaments, parties, and electoral systems—and the process of politics, as it is revealed in political participation, civil society, economic change, and the quality of democratic government within and beyond the region.

Clearly written and well supported with references and suggestions for further reading, Developments in Central and East European Politics 4 is the ideal guide to the process of change in a group of states that were formerly modeled on the Soviet Union but are now a distinctive and varied presence within a continent that has been redefining its boundaries, its values, its economic systems, and its international allegiances.

Contributors. Judy Batt, Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Sarah Birch, Heather Grabbe, Tim Haughton, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Petr Kopecký, Paul G. Lewis, Frances Millard, Cas Mudde, D. Mario Nuti, Mark Pittaway, Ray Taras, Stephen White, Andrew Wilson, Kataryna Wolczuk

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter