Though better known for his theological writings, Swedish scientist and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was also an inventor who was extraordinarily ahead of his time. One of his early designs, circa 1714, was "a machine to fly in the air" -- anticipating the modern airplane by more than 150 years. With its oval, fixed "sail," Swedenborg's contribution soars above its predecessors with its simple, workable design.
Henry Soderberg encountered this remarkable invention while research for a book on the history of flight. In this account Soderberg offers an overview on the dream of flight through the centuries and places Swedenborg at a pivotal point in aviation history.
Swedish man of letters Lars Bergquist explains the often enigmatic but always fascinating dream journal kept by Emanuel Swedenborg from 1743 to 1744. A scientist, Swedenborg meticulously recorded his dreams and visions, adding interpretations that foreshadowed modern dream analysis. After an Easter vision in 1745, Swedenborg abandoned his scientific studies and dedicated his life to studying the inner meaning of Sacred Scripture. In his diary, he reveals his daily life and the reflections that are a key to understanding his later spiritual works.
"The book enables us to follow Swedenborg...from dismal gloom to inner splendor."
--Gunnar Bronerg, Upsala Nya Tidning
When he entered the visionary phase of his life, Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) set out on a journey to document all that he had seen, heard, and learned while in contact with the spirits of heaven and hell. Before his death, he wrote eighteen different works published in twenty-five volumes, totaling about three and a half million words.
Navigating that rich garden of thought has been a challenge even for scholars of Swedenborg, let alone those new to his work. In this compact guide, Jonathan S. Rose introduces readers to the basic concepts of Swedenborg’s thought, including Swedenborg’s view of God and the afterlife and his description of humanity’s spiritual history. Rose also examines how Swedenborg’s theology relates to other Christian denominations, both in his time and ours, and takes a side trip into some of Swedenborg’s more unusual ideas.
Swedenborg’s Garden of Theology provides an ideal introduction for anyone seeking a starting point to delve into Swedenborg’s religious thought.
Sweden's Development From Poverty to Affluence, 1750–1970 was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Contemporary Sweden commands a degree of interest and attention from foreigners that is all out of proportion to its small size and its present position among the world powers. The country, at least since the publication of Marquis Childs's book Sweden: The Middle Way in 1936, has become synonymous with the idea of a welfare state or cradle-to-grave social security. But accurate, unbiased information about the development of modern Sweden has been scanty, and this book is designed to fill the gap.
Thirteen Swedish scholars—historians, political scientists, sociologists, and an economist—look at particular aspects of Swedish history over the last two centuries. Steven Koblik, the editor, provides an extensive general introduction as well as brief introductions as background for each of the essays.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large numbers of Swedish immigrants came to Michigan seeking new opportunities in the United States and relief from economic, religious, or political problems at home. In addition to establishing early farming communities, Swedish immigrants worked on railroad construction, mining, fishing, logging, and urban manufacturing. As a result, Swedish Americans made significant contributions to the economic and cultural landscape of Michigan, a history this book explores in engaging and illustrative depth. Swedes in Michigan traces the evolution of hard-working people who valued education and assimilated actively while simultaneously maintaining their cultural ties and institutions. Moving from past to present, the book examines community patterns, family connections, social organizations, exchange programs, ethnic celebrations, and business and technical achievements that have helped Swedes in Michigan maintain a sense of their heritage even as they have adapted to American life.
"America fever" gripped Sweden in the middle of the nineteenth century, seethed to a peak in 1910, when one-fifth of the world’s Swedes lived in America, cooled during World War I, and chilled to dead ash with the advent of the Great Depression in 1930.
Swedish Exodus, the first English translation and revision of Lars Ljungmark’s Den Stora Utvandringen, recounts more than a century of Swedish emigration, concentrating on such questions as who came to America, how the character of the emigrants changed with each new wave of emigration, what these people did when they reached their adopted country, and how they gradually became Americanized.
Ljungmark’s essential challenge was to capture in a factual account the broad sweep of emigration history. But often he narrows his focus to look closely at those who took part in this mass migration. Through historical records and personal letters, Ljungmark brings many of these people back to life. One young woman, for example, loved her parents, but loved America more: "I never expect to speak to you in this life. . . . Your loving daughter unto death." Like most immigrants, she never expected to return. Another immigrant wrote back seeking a wife: "I wonder how you have it and if you are living. . . . Are you married or unmarried? If you are unmarried, you can have a good home with me."
Ljungmark also focuses closely on some of the leaders: Peter Cassel, a liberal temperance supporter and free-church leader whose community in America prospered; Hans Mattson, a colonel in the Civil War and founder of a colony in Minnesota; Erik Jansson, a book burner, self-proclaimed messiah, and founder of the Bishop Hill Colony; Gustaf Unonius, a student idealist and founder of a Wisconsin colony that faltered.
The story of Swedish immigrants in the United States is the story in miniature of the greatest mass migration in human history, that of thirty-five million Europeans who left their homes to come to America. It is a human story of interest not only to Swedes but to everyone.
José Antonio Antón-Pacheco exercises his expertise in philosophy in this meditation on the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg.
In this book he tackles subjects as diverse as the nature of unity and the way that the Divine manifests in the world; the nature of human beings as they relate to the higher realms, and specifically Swedenborg’s concept of the Grand Man or Universal Human; the mystical nature of Swedenborg’s interpretation of the Bible; and the nature of time and space in the spiritual world. Alongside his exploration of Swedenborg’s thought are examinations of Swedenborg’s influence on a variety of different thinkers and authors, from Jorge Luis Borges to Ibn ’Arabi.
This book was originally published in Spanish as El profeta del norte: Un libro sobre Swedenborg. Perfect for scholars and serious students of Swedenborg’s thought, Antón Pacheco’s powerful writing casts a new light on the Swedish prophet.
Reframing Swedish–American relations by focusing on contacts, crossings, and convergences beyond migration
Studies of Swedish American history and identity have largely been confined to separate disciplines, such as history, literature, or politics. In Swedish–American Borderlands, this collection edited by Dag Blanck and Adam Hjorthén seeks to reconceptualize and redefine the field of Swedish–American relations by reviewing more complex cultural, social, and economic exchanges and interactions that take a broader approach to the international relationship—ultimately offering an alternative way of studying the history of transatlantic relations.
Swedish–American Borderlands studies connections and contacts between Sweden and the United States from the seventeenth century to today, exploring how movements of people have informed the circulation of knowledge and ideas between the two countries. The volume brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences to investigate multiple transcultural exchanges between Sweden and the United States. Rather than concentrating on one-way processes or specific national contexts, Swedish–American Borderlands adopts the concept of borderlands to examine contacts, crossings, and convergences between the nations, featuring specific case studies of topics like jazz, architecture, design, genealogy, and more.
By placing interactions, entanglements, and cross-border relations at the center of the analysis, Swedish–American Borderlands seeks to bridge disciplinary divides, joining a diverse set of scholars and scholarship in writing an innovative history of Swedish–American relations to produce new understandings of what we perceive as Swedish, American, and Swedish American.
Contributors: Philip J. Anderson, North Park U; Jennifer Eastman Attebery, Idaho State U; Marie Bennedahl, Linnaeus U; Ulf Jonas Björk, Indiana U–Indianapolis; Thomas J. Brown, U of South Carolina; Margaret E. Farrar, John Carroll U; Charlotta Forss, Stockholm U; Gunlög Fur, Linnaeus U; Karen V. Hansen, Brandeis U; Angela Hoffman, Uppsala U; Adam Kaul, Augustana College; Maaret Koskinen, Stockholm U; Merja Kytö, Uppsala U; Svea Larson, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Franco Minganti, U of Bologna; Frida Rosenberg, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm; Magnus Ullén, Stockholm U.
Laura Redden Searing (1839-1923) defied critics of the time by establishing herself as a successful poet, a poet who was deaf. She began writing verse at the Missouri School for the Deaf in 1858, and, under the pseudonym Howard Glyndon, soon found herself catapulted into national prominence by her patriotic Civil War poems. Abraham Lincoln himself bought her books, the most critically acclaimed being Idylls of Battle and Poems of the Rebellion, published in 1864. Her poem “Belle Missouri” became the song of the Missouri Volunteers, and she was sent by the St. Louis Republican newspaper to Washington as a war correspondent.
Despite her success, detractors decried her poetry simply because she was deaf, asking how she could know anything of rhyme, rhythm, or musical composition. She quieted them with the simple elegance of her words and the sophistication of her allegorical themes. Readers can enjoy her work again in this volume, which features more than 70 of her finest poems. They also will learn her feelings about the constraints imposed on 19th-century women in her epic narrative of misunderstanding and lost love “Sweet Bells Jangled:”
Out of sight of the heated land
Over the breezy sea;
Into the reach of the solemn mist
Quietly drifted we.
Her restoration will be an event welcomed by poetry aficionados everywhere.
Ann Flesor Beck's charming personal account recreates the atmosphere of her grandfather's candy kitchen with its odors of chocolate and popcorn and the comings-and-goings of family members. "The Store" represented success while anchoring the business district of Gus's chosen home. It also embodied the Midwest émigré experience of chain migration, immigrant networking, resistance and outright threats by local townspeople, food-related entrepreneurship, and tensions over whether later generations would take over the business.
An engaging blend of family memoir and Midwest history, Sweet Greeks tells how Greeks became candy makers to the nation, one shop at a time.
Tony Hoagland captures the recognizably American landscape of a man of his generation: sex, friendship, rock and roll, cars, high optimism, and disillusion. With what Robert Pinsky has called “the saving vulgarity of American poetry,” Hoagland’s small biographies of destruction reveal that defeat is a natural prelude to grace and loss a kind of threshold to freedom.
“A remarkable book. Without any rhetorical straining, with a disarming witty directness, these poems manage to transform every subject they touch, from love to politics, reaching out from the local and the personal to place the largest issues in the context of feeling. It’s hard to think of a recent book that succeeds with equal grace in fusing the truth-telling and the lyric impulse, clarity and song, in a way that produces such consistent pleasure and surprise.”—Carl Dennis
“This is wonderful poetry: exuberant, self-assured, instinct with wisdom and passion.”—Carolyn Kizer
“There is a fine strong sense in these poems of real lives being lived in a real world. This is something I greatly prize. And it is all colored, sometimes brightly, by the poet’s own highly romantic vision of things, so that what we may think we already know ends up seeming rich and strange.”—Donald Justice
“In Sweet Ruin, we’re banging along the Baja of our little American lives, spritzing truth from our lapels, elbowing our compadres, the Seven Deadly Sins. Maybe we’re unhappy in a less than tragic way, but our ruin requires of us a love and understanding and loyalty just as deep and sweet as any tragic hero’s. And it’s all the more poignant in a sad and funny way because the purpose of this forced spiritual march, Hoagland seems to be saying, is to leave ourselves behind. Undoubtedly, you will recognize among the body count many of your selves.”—Jack Myers
Classical deities and down-and-out junkies, high school sweethearts and the inner life of JFK—these are the coordinates of J.T. Barbarese’s terrain. The poems in Sweet Spot set up shop where average lived experience meets American history. Masterfully evokes both the specific land- and cityscapes of his poems as well the psychological types of the varied characters that populate them, Sweet Spot confirms Barbarese’s preeminence as a chronicler of the heroic everyday, the telling detail, the subtle reminders of the human predicament hidden in habit and memory.
An Irish working-class hero of Pittsburgh, Billy Conn captured hearts through his ebullient personality, stellar boxing record, and good looks. A light heavyweight boxing champion best remembered for his sensational near-defeat of heavyweight champion Joe Louis in 1941, Conn is still regarded as one of the greatest fighters of all time. Andrew O'Toole chronicles the boxing, Hollywood, and army careers of "the Pittsburgh Kid" by drawing from newspaper accounts, Billy's personal scrapbooks, and fascinating interviews with family. Presenting an intimate look at the champion's relationships with his girlfriend, manager, and rivals, O'Toole compellingly captures the personal life of a public icon and the pageantry of sports during the 1930s and '40s.
A bold new indictment of the racialization of science
Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.
James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.
Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.
The Sweetness of Freedom presents an eclectic grouping of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants' narratives and the personal artifacts, historical documents, and photographs these travelers brought on their journeys to Michigan. Most of the oral histories in this volume are based on interviews conducted with the immigrants themselves.
Some of the immigrants presented here hoped to gain better education and jobs. Others—refugees—fled their homelands because of war, poverty, repression, religious persecution, or ethnic discrimination. All dreamt of freedom and opportunity. They tell why they left their homelands, why they chose to settle in Michigan, and what they brought or left behind. Some wanted to preserve their heritage, religious customs, traditions, and ethnic identity. Others wanted to forget past conflicts and lost family members. Their stories reveal how they established new lives far away from home, how they endured homesickness and separation, what they gave up and what they gained.
This is the second volume of Irvin Ehrenpreis's trilogy, and deals with the period 1699-1714. The years between 1699 and 1710 were a time of training—in some ways unfortunate, as Ehrenpreis shows—for the dramatic four years which followed for Swift, as a political journalist in England.
Swift's ecclesiastical career, his search for preferment and the gradual transformation of his social life are examined. The author also scrutinizes Swift's attachment to Esther Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh, the evolution of his political principles, and his unconscious motivations, and he reaches some original conclusions. Above all, however, Ehrenpreis concentrates on Swift's literary works of this period; and for some of these, such as An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, The Conduct of the Allies, and A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions, he provides analyses that can stand as independent critical essays.
Volume Two lives up in every way to the high hopes generated for it by Volume One. It draws widely on contemporary documents and on modern research into Swift's life and times, providing much new information as well as judgements that are both judicious and original.
This book assesses Woodland Period interactions using technofunctional, mineralogical, and chemical data derived from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped sherds whose provenience is fully documented from both mortuary mounds and village middens along the Atlantic coast. Together, these data demonstrate formal and functional differences between mortuary and village assemblages along with the nearly exclusive occurrence of foreign-made cooking pots in mortuary contexts. The Swift Creek Gift provides insight into the unique workings of gift exchanges to transform seemingly mundane materials like cooking pots into powerful tools of commemoration, affiliation, and ownership.
“They looked at us like we were not supposed to be scientists,” says one young African American girl, describing one openly hostile reaction she encountered in the classroom. In this significant study, Sandra Hanson explains that although many young minority girls are interested in science, the racism and sexism in the field discourage them from pursuing it after high school. Those girls that remain highly motivated to continue studying science must “swim against the tide.”
Hanson examines the experiences of African American girls in science education using multiple methods of quantitative and qualitative research, including a web survey and vignette techniques. She understands the complex interaction between race and gender in the science domain and, using a multicultural and feminist framework of analysis, addresses the role of agency and resistance that encourages and sustains interest in science in African American families and communities.
Swimming at Midnight collects the short and middle-length poems from John Matthias’s earlier books together with twenty poems that have previously appeared only in magazines. It is published simultaneously with Beltane at Aphelion, which includes all of Matthias’s longer poems. The two books together represent some thirty years of his work.
The poems in Swimming at Midnight range from early lyrics written in American during the late 1960s to meditative poems dealing with historical, geographical and cultural themes deriving from Matthias’s years in England in the seventies and eighties; they include the epistolary poems from Turns, “Poem for Cynouai” from Crossing, “A Wind in Roussillon” from Northern Summer, and the formal experiments engaging issues of poetics and metaphysics for which Matthias is well known. The book concludes with a section of new poems and translations dealing both with the public world of modern history and the private experience of life in the century’s final decade. The last poem of all connects the work in Swimming at Midnight with the last of the long poems in Beltane at Aphelion.
Critics have been warm in their praise of Matthias’s work. Robert Duncan called his early poetry “the work of a Goliard—one of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time,” and Guy Davenport has said that his recent work makes him “one of the leading poets in the USA.” D. M. Thomas in the TLS admired the “virtuosity” of Turns and the way “life presses into the poems,” while John Fuller in the same journal found the poems in Crossing “bursting with a masterful intelligence.” In a long essay on Northern Summer, Jeremy Hooker wrote: “In his combination of lyrical and discursive voices, as in subject and concern, Matthias has an exciting range…He writes in some poems from a tension between a scribe’s respect for the integrity of his materials and a magician’s freedom to transform them, and in many poems he brings together the contrasting gifts and is fully present as himself, both scribe and magician.”
Nothing beats a natural swimming hole for cooling off on a scorching summer day in Texas. Cold, clear spring water, big old shade trees, and a quiet stretch of beach or lawn offer the perfect excuse to pack a cooler and head out with family and friends to the nearest natural oasis. Whether you’re looking for a quick getaway or an unforgettable summer vacation, let The Swimming Holes of Texas be your guide.
Julie Wernersbach and Carolyn Tracy highlight one hundred natural swimming spots across the entire state. The book is organized by geographic regions, so you can quickly find local places to swim—or plan a trip to a more distant spot you’d like to explore. Each swimming hole is illustrated with an inviting color photo and a description of what it’s like to swim there, as well as the site’s history, ecology, and conservation. The authors include all the pertinent info about admission fees and hours, parking, and on-site amenities such as showers and restrooms. They also offer tips for planning your trips and lists of the swimming holes that are most welcoming to families and pets.
So when the temperature tops 100 and there’s nothing but traffic in sight, take a detour down the backroads and swim, sunbathe, revel, and relax in the swimming holes of Texas.
How “innovative” finance schemes skim public wealth while hijacking public governance
Charter school expansion. Vouchers. Scholarship tax credit programs. The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance offers a new social theory to explain why these and other privatization policies and programs win support despite being unsupported by empirical evidence. Kenneth J. Saltman details how, under the guise of innovation, cost savings, and corporate social responsibility, new and massive neoliberal educational privatization schemes have been widely adopted in the United States. From a trillion-dollar charter school bubble to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to celebrities branding private schools, Saltman ultimately connects such schemes to the country’s current crisis of truth and offers advice for resistance.
Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
In May 1835 in a Sydney courtroom, a slight, balding man named John Dow stood charged with forgery. The prisoner shocked the room by claiming he was Edward, Viscount Lascelles, eldest son of the powerful Earl of Harewood. The Crown alleged he was a confidence trickster and serial impostor. Was this really the heir to one of Britain's most spectacular fortunes?
Part Regency mystery, part imperial history, A Swindler's Progress is an engrossing tale of adventure and deceit across two worlds—British aristocrats and Australian felons—bound together in an emerging age of opportunity and individualism, where personal worth was battling power based on birth alone. The first historian to unravel the mystery of John Dow and Edward Lascelles, Kirsten McKenzie illuminates the darker side of this age of liberty, when freedom could mean the freedom to lie both in the far-flung outposts of empire and within the established bastions of British power.
The struggles of the Lascelles family for social and political power, and the tragedy of their disgraced heir, demonstrate that British elites were as fragile as their colonial counterparts. In ways both personal and profound, McKenzie recreates a world in which Britain and the empire were intertwined in the transformation of status and politics in the nineteenth century.
When people think of the hottest cities of the Jazz Age and Swing Era, New York, Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis, Kansas City, and Chicago immediately spring to mind. But Newark, New Jersey was just as happening as each of these towns. On any given evening, you could listen to a legendary singer like Sarah Vaughan or laugh at the celebrated comedy of Red Foxx. Newark was a veritable maze of thriving theaters, clubs, and after-hours joints where the sporting folks rambled through the night. There were plenty of jobs for musicians and entertainers, so the city was teaming with musical talent.
Swing City reveals Newark’s role as an undocumented entertainment mecca between 1922 and 1950. The book is based on interviews with musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, bartenders, waitresses, nightclub owners, and their families and is heavily illustrated with rare photographs from the author’s personal collection. Barbara J. Kukla presents a musical tour of the city, covering the vaudeville acts, the musicians who started at Newark’s Orpheum Theater and went on to join famous bands, and the teenage dancers who started as chorus girls and eventually toured with famous tap dancers. She also describes the house rent parties of the 1930s, the “colored only” clubs, the entertainment at Newark’s 1,000 saloons during Prohibition, and the Coleman Hotel where Billie Holiday often stayed. Throughout the book, which concentrates on performers’ lives and personalities, Kukla discusses music and other forms of entertainment as social and economic survival tools in Newark’s Third Ward during a time of ruthless segregation.
Swing City includes several appendixes that provide a virtual “Who’s Who” of 25 years of nightlife activities in Newark. Music and nostalgia buffs, students of African American history, and anyone who’s ever been to Newark will find in this bookfabulous entertainment.
"Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe" compares the work, family, and economic experiences of enslaved women and men in upcountry and lowland Georgia during the nineteenth century. Mining planters' daybooks, plantation records, and a wealth of other sources, Daina Ramey Berry shows how slaves' experiences on large plantations, which were essentially self-contained, closed communities, contrasted with those on small plantations, where planters' interests in sharing their workforce allowed slaves more open, fluid communications. By inviting readers into slaves' internal lives through her detailed examination of domestic violence, separation and sale, and forced breeding, Berry also reveals important new ways of understanding what it meant to be a female or male slave, as well as how public and private aspects of slave life influenced each other on the plantation.
A volume in the series Women in American History, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Susan Armitage, Susan K. Cahn, and Deborah Gray White
From the telegraph to the touchscreen, how the development of binary switching transformed everyday life and changed the shape of human agency
The Switch traces the sudden rise of a technology that has transformed everyday life for billions of people: the binary switch. By chronicling the rapid growth of binary switching since the mid-nineteenth century, Jason Puskar contends that there is no human activity as common today as pushing a button or flipping a switch—the deceptively simple act of turning something on or off. More than a technical history, The Switch offers a cultural and political analysis of how reducing so much human action to binary alternatives has profoundly reshaped modern society.
Analyzing this history, Puskar charts the rapid shift from analog to digital across a range of devices—keyboards, cameras, guns, light switches, computers, game controls, even the “nuclear button”—to understand how nineteenth-century techniques continue to influence today’s pervasive digital technologies. In contexts that include musical performance, finger counting, machine writing, voting methods, and immersive play, Puskar shows how the switch to switching led to radically new forms of action and thought.
The innovative analysis in The Switch makes clear that binary inputs have altered human agency by making choice instantaneous, effort minimal, and effects more far-reaching than ever. In the process, it concludes, switching also fosters forms of individualism that, though empowering for many, also preserve a legacy of inequality and even domination.
Media critics invariably disparage the quality of programming produced by the U.S. television industry. But why the industry produces what it does is a question largely unasked. It is this question, at the crux of American popular culture, that Switching Channels explores.
In the past twenty-five years, the expansion of cable and satellite systems has transformed television. Richard Caves examines the economics of this phenomenon--and the nature and logic of the broadcast networks' response to the incursion of cable TV, especially the shift to inexpensive unscripted game and "reality" shows and "news" magazines. An explanation of these changes, Caves argues, requires an understanding of two very different sectors: the "creative industry," which produces programs; and the commercial channels, which bring them to viewers. His book shows how distributors' judgment of profitability determines the quality and character of the programs the creative industry produces. This determination, writes Caves, depends on the number and types of viewers that various programs can attract and advertisers' willingness to pay for their attention, as well as the organization of the networks that package programs, the distributors that transmit them, and the deals these parties strike with one another.
Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion.
Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policymakers, and artists, alike.
Switzerland: A Village History is an account of an Alpine village that illuminates the broader history of Switzerland and its rural, local underpinnings. It begins with the colonization of the Alps by Romanized Celtic peoples who came from the plain to clear the wilderness, establish a tiny monastic house, and create a dairy economy that became famous for its cheeses. Over ten centuries the village, like the rest of Switzerland, went through the traumas of religious reformation and political revolution. A single currency, a unified postal service, and eventually an integrated army brought improved stability and prosperity to the union of two dozen small republics.
Yet Switzerland’s enduring foundation remains the three thousand boroughs to which the Swiss people feel they truly belong. In Switzerland: A Village History, distinguished scholar David Birmingham tells the story of his childhood village-Château-d’Oex-where records of cheesemaking date to 1328. The evolution of this ancient grazing and forest economy included the rise of the legal profession to keep track of complex deeds, grazing allotments, and animal rights-of-way. Switzerland’s eventual privatization of communal grazing land drove many highlanders to emigrate to the European plains and overseas to the Americas. The twentieth century brought wealth from foreign tourism to Switzerland, punctuated by austerities imposed by Europe’s wars. Alpine peasants were integrated into Swiss union society and began at last to share in some of the prosperity flowing from urban industry.
Switzerland: A Village History replaces the mythology and patriotic propaganda that too often have passed for Swiss history with a rigorous, insightful, and charming account of the daily life, small-scale rivalries, and local loyalties that actually make up Swiss history.
When her parents died and her marriage disintegrated within the span of a few months, art historian and performance artist Joanna Frueh entered a painful period of grief and mourning. This book is about how she healed herself and in the process explored the range of her potential as a woman.Swooning Beauty is an intimate memoir of discovery and healing. Frueh’s path to recovery lay through a profound examination of her intuitions, desires, fantasies, dreams, and emotions, her capacity for pleasure—visual, sensual, intellectual, gastronomic, and erotic—and her sense of her own heroic female identity. Hers is the passionate voice of a creative, intelligent woman scrutinizing the nature of love in all its forms and the ways of being that make us free, flexible, more fully real and more fully human. The result is an engaging view into the rich and colorful inner life of a woman at the threshold of middle age, of the blossoming of mind and spirit that comes after suffering and self-realization. Pleasure, she concludes, “is the absence of lack. Self-love is a necessary plenitude. Vigilance in love brings us freedom. Freedom is not an absolute whose attainment is humanly impossible. Yogis say that the self that is not ego is free. That self is the spacious heart, the spacious mind.” Frueh offers us wisdom and comfort for the journey into middle age, and the deep pleasure of encountering a generous, lively spirit and a remarkably spacious mind.
This ranging epistolary novel follows Julia Grenville, a Welsh beauty who knows little of the world until her marriage to the older Lord Stanley. Through Julia’s letters to her sister, readers learn more of Julia’s new life in London—her unfaithful husband, her miscarriage, her disillusionment with the city and its fashions. Other letters reveal that Julia has a longtime admirer, Harry Woodley, from her former life, as well as a mysterious guardian angel: her Sylph. This character guides Julia away from the depravities of her life in London, including her gambling problem. The Sylph is also another sympathetic ear to Julia’s increasing marital dissatisfaction and growing affinity for another man, the Baron Ton-hausen. As Julia nearly falls prey to the overzealous admirations of one of her husband’s associates, her husband is consumed by gambling debts to that same associate. She is shocked to discover the depths of her husband’s ruin and plans to flee to Wales before she too can be claimed in payment. Her disgraced husband takes the ultimate way out and Julia goes home to her father and sister in Wales. Her Sylph is not far behind, however, and soon reveals himself to Julia to be more than she could have ever imagined.
From militant suffragette at the beginning of the twentieth century to campaigner against colonialism in Africa after the Second World War, Sylvia Pankhurst dedicated her life to fighting oppression and injustice.
In this vivid biography Katherine Connelly examines Pankhurst’s role at the forefront of significant developments in the history of radical politics. She guides us through Pankhurst's construction of a suffragette militancy which put working-class women at the heart of the struggle, her championing of the Bolshevik Revolution and her clandestine attempts to sabotage the actions of the British state, as well as her early identification of the dangers of Fascism.
The book explores the dilemmas, debates and often painful personal consequences faced by Pankhurst which were played out in her art, writings and activism. It argues that far from being an advocate of disparate causes, Pankhurst’s campaigns were united by an essential continuity which hold vital lessons for achieving social change. This lively and accessible biography presents Pankhurst as a courageous and inspiring campaigner, of huge relevance to those engaged in social movements today.
More than eighty years ago, before we knew much about the structure of cells, Russian botanist Boris Kozo-Polyansky brilliantly outlined the concept of symbiogenesis, the symbiotic origin of cells with nuclei. It was a half-century later, only when experimental approaches that Kozo-Polyansky lacked were applied to his hypotheses, that scientists began to accept his view that symbiogenesis could be united with Darwin's concept of natural selection to explain the evolution of life. After decades of neglect, ridicule, and intellectual abuse, Kozo-Polyansky's ideas are now endorsed by virtually all biologists.
Kozo-Polyansky's seminal work is presented here for the first time in an outstanding annotated translation, updated with commentaries, references, and modern micrographs of symbiotic phenomena.
Utah Series in Middle East Studies
Today, nationalism and nationalist sentiments are becoming more and more pronounced, creating a global emergence of ethno-nationalist and religious fundamentalist identity conflicts. In the post-9/11 era of international terrorism, it is appropriate to suggest that nationalism will retain its central place in politics and local and world affairs for the foreseeable future. It is in this vein that there has been a recent upsurge of interest concerning the power of nationalist tendencies as one of the dominant ideologies of modern times.
Symbiotic Antagonisms looks at the state-centric mode of modernization in Turkey that has constituted the very foundation on which nationalism has acquired its ideological status and transformative power. The book documents a symposium held at Sabanci University, presenting nationalism as a multidimensional, multiactor-based phenomenon that functions as an ideology, a discourse, and a political strategy. Turkish, Kurdish, and Islamic nationalisms are systematically compared in this timely and significant work.
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