A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Understanding Disaster Insurance provides an accessible introduction to the complexities—and exciting possibilities—of risk transfer markets in the U.S. and around the world. Carolyn Kousky, a leading researcher on disaster risk and insurance, explains how traditional insurance markets came to be structured and why they fall short in meeting the needs of a world coping with climate change. She then offers realistic, yet hopeful, examples of new approaches. With examples ranging from individual entrepreneurs to multi-country collaborations, she shows how innovative thinking and creative applications of insurance-based mechanisms can improve recovery outcomes for people and their communities. She also explores the role of insurance in supporting policy goals beyond disaster recovery, such as nature-positive approaches for larger environmental impact. The book holds up the possibility that new risk transfer markets, brought to scale, could help create more equitable and sustainable economies.
Insurance and risk transfer markets can be a powerful tool for adapting to climate change, yet they are frequently misunderstood. Many find insurance confusing or even problematic and ineffective. Understanding Disaster Insurance is a useful guidebook for policymakers, innovators, students, and other decision makers working to secure a resilient future—and anyone affected by wind, fire, rain, or flood.
In Understanding Dogs, sociologist and faithful dog companion Clinton R. Sanders explores the day-to-day experiences of living and working with domestic dogs. Based on a decade of research in veterinary offices and hospitals, dog guide training schools, and obediences classes -- and colored with his personal experiences and observations at and outside home with his own canine companions -- Sanders's book examines how everyday dog owners come to know their animal companions as thinking, emotional, and responsive individuals.
Linking animal companionship with social as well as personal identity, Understanding Dogs uses detailed ethnographic data in viewing human and animal efforts to understand, manipulate, care for, and interact with each other. From nineteenth-century disapproval of what was seen as irresponsibly indulgent pet ownership among the poor to Bill Clinton's caring and fun-loving image and populist connection to the "common person" as achieved through his labrador companion Buddy, Sanders looks at how dogs serve not only as social facilitators but also as adornments to social identity. He also reveals how, while we often strive to teach and shape our dogs' behavior, dogs often teach us to appreciate with more awareness a nourishing meal, physical warmth, a walk in the woods, and the simple joys of the immediate moment.
Sanders devotes chapters to the specialized work of guide dog trainers; the problems and joys experienced by guide dog owners; the day-to-day work of veterinarians dealing with the healing, death, and euthanizing of their animal patients; and the everyday interactions, assumptions, and approaches of people who choose, for various reasons and in various ways, to spend their lives in the company of dogs.
Understanding Dogs will interest those who live and work with animals as well as those studying the sociology of human-animal interactions.
Providing strong evidence for the role of the quantity of money in the revitalization, the author ultimately concludes that the seemingly robust monetary explanation of the recovery is deficient, as is any that relies principally on aggregate demand impulses. An accurate understanding of this phenomenon must account for the inherent tendency of the economy to revert to its long-run high employment trend.
Frank G. Steindl is Regents Professor of Economics and Ardmore Professor of Business Administration, Oklahoma State University.
In recent years critics have assailed the cost, inefficiency, and unfairness of American tort law, including products liability and medical malpractice. Yet victims of accidental injury who look to the tort system for deserved compensation often find it a formidable obstacle. Those who seek to reform tort law find legislatures, particularly the United States Congress, paralyzed by the clash of powerful special interest groups.
Understanding Enterprise Liability sheds new light on the raging tort reform debate by challenging its fundamental assumptions. Offering historical insights and fresh perspectives on the politics and possibilities for sensible reform, Virginia Nolan and Edmund Ursin pragmatically assess alternative routes to a workable, balanced, and equitable system of compensation for personal injury. They offer a specific proposal, based on the precedent of strict products liability that incorporates the insights of no-fault compensation plan scholarship to create an enterprise liability doctrine that should appeal to courts and to tort reformers.
More than any other field of public administration, environmental administration is defined by its legal content. Federal legislation has a direct and immediate impact on state and federal bureaucrats, and citizen groups must constantly adjust to changing standards for environmental protection and regulation.
In Understanding Environmental Administration and Law, Susan J. Buck examines the use of environmental law by exploring the policy process through which such law is made, the political environment in which it is applied, and the statutory and case laws that are critical to working within the regulatory system. The book provides an analytic framework for the legal context of environmental administration and familiarizes readers with the development and implementation of the federal regulatory structure.
First published in 1991, this revised and expanded edition includes new material on:
- the continuing evolution of environmentalism in the United States
- federalism and bureaucratic decision making within the context of the American legal system
- citizen suits, counter suits, and the increasingly restrictive perspective of the federal judiciary toward standing
- the property rights movement
- the impact of political changes on policy development
More than any other field of public administration, environmental administration is defined by its legal content. Federal legislation has a direct and immediate impact on state and federal bureaucrats, and citizen groups must constantly adjust to changing standards for environmental protection and regulation.
In Understanding Environmental Administration and Law, Susan J. Buck examines the use of environmental law by exploring the policy process through which such law is made, the political environment in which it is applied, and the statutory and case laws that are critical to working within the regulatory system. The book provides an analytic framework for the legal context of environmental administration and familiarizes readers with the development and implementation of the federal regulatory structure.
A revised and expanded edition of this book was published by Island Press in 1996.
Understanding Environmental Administration and Law provides an engaging, introductory overview of environmental policy. Author Susan J. Buck explores the process through which policy is made, the political environment in which it is applied, and the statutory and case laws that are critical to working within the regulatory system. This revised and expanded third edition adds case studies that help bring the subject to life and includes new material on:
- the Bush Administration and its approach to administering environmental laws
- the continuing evolution of environmentalism and the changing role of environmental regulation in the United States
- the development and implementation of environmental agreements at the international level
- the impacts and implications of globalization
Understanding Environmental Administration and Law provides a framework for understanding the law as a managerial tool.
From the introduction
Film remains one of the most dominant cultural forms in the world today. Crossing classes and cultures, it permeates many aspects of our consciousness. In film, perhaps more than any other medium, we can read the politics of time and place, past and present. The history of Marxism has intersected with film in many ways and this book is a timely reminder of the fruits of that intersection, in film theory and film practice. Marxist film theory returns to film studies some of the key concepts which make possible a truly radical, political understanding of the medium and its place both within capitalism and against it. This book shows how questions of ideology, technology and industry must be situated in relation to class – a category which academia is distinctly uncomfortable with. It explores the work of some of the key theorists who have influenced our understanding of film, such as Adorno, Althusser, Benjamin, Brecht, Gramsci, Jameson and others. It shows how films must be situated in their social and historical contexts, whether Hollywood, Russian, Cuban, Chinese or North Korean cinema. The authors explore the political contradictions and tensions within dominant cinema and discuss how Marxist filmmakers have pushed the medium in new and exciting directions.
Global trade is of vital interest to citizens as well as policymakers, yet it is widely misunderstood. This compact exposition of the market forces underlying international commerce addresses both of these concerned groups, as well as the needs of students and scholars. Although it contains no equations, it is almost mathematical in its elegance, precision, and power of expression.
Understanding Global Trade provides a thorough explanation of what shapes the international organization of production and distribution and the resulting trade flows. It reviews the evolution of knowledge in this field from Adam Smith to today as a process of theoretical modeling, accumulation of new empirical data, and then revision of analytical frameworks in response to evidence and changing circumstances. It explains the sources of comparative advantage and how they lead countries to specialize in making products which they then sell to other countries. While foreign trade contributes to the overall welfare of a nation, it also creates winners and losers, and Helpman describes mechanisms through which trade affects a country's income distribution.
The book provides a clear and original account of the revolutions in trade theory of the 1980s and the most recent decade. It shows how scholars shifted the analysis of trade flows from the sectoral level to the business-firm level, to elucidate the growing roles of multinational corporations, offshoring, and outsourcing in the international division of labor. Helpman’s explanation of the latest research findings is essential for an understanding of world affairs.
Updated to reflect current research and technologies, this beautifully illustrated guide includes images of important manuscript illuminations from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum and beyond. Concise, readable explanations of the technical terms most frequently encountered in manuscript studies make this portable volume an essential resource for students, scholars, and readers who wish a deeper understanding and enjoyment of illuminated manuscripts and medieval book production.
Indian movies are among the most popular in the world. However, despite increased availability and study, these films remain misunderstood and underappreciated in much of the English-speaking world, in part for cultural reasons.
In this book, Patrick Colm Hogan sets out through close analysis and explication of culturally particular information about Indian history, Hindu metaphysics, Islamic spirituality, Sanskrit aesthetics, and other Indian traditions to provide necessary cultural contexts for understanding Indian films. Hogan analyzes eleven important films, using them as the focus to explore the topics of plot, theme, emotion, sound, and visual style in Indian cinema. These films draw on a wide range of South Asian cultural traditions and are representative of the greater whole of Indian cinema. By learning to interpret these examples with the tools Hogan provides, the reader will be able to take these skills and apply them to other Indian films.
But this study is not simply culturalist. Hogan also takes up key principles from cognitive neuroscience to illustrate that all cultures share perceptual, cognitive, and emotional elements that, when properly interpreted, can help to bridge gaps between seemingly disparate societies. Hogan locates the specificity of Indian culture in relation to human universals, and illustrates this cultural-cognitive synthesis through his detailed interpretations of these films. This book will help both scholars and general readers to better understand and appreciate Indian cinema.
International Sign is regarded as a lingua franca that is employed by deaf people to communicate with other deaf people who do not share the same conventionalized local sign language. Contrary to widely-held belief, sign languages are not composed of a unified system of universal gestures—rather, they are distinctly different, and most are mutually unintelligible from one another. The phenomenon of IS has emerged through increased global interaction during recent decades, driven by a rise in the number of international conferences and events and by new technologies that allow for enhanced global communication. IS is gaining acceptance for providing communicative access to conference audience members who do not have knowledge of the designated conference languages, and it is being recruited for use due to the prohibitive expense of providing interpreting services in numerous different sign languages. However, it is not known how well audience members understand IS, and it may actually limit equal access to the interpreted information.
Whynot compares IS to native sign languages and analyzes the distribution of linguistic elements in the IS lexicon and their combined effect on comprehension. Her findings indicate that audiences with diverse sign languages understand much less of IS presentations than has been previously assumed. Whynot’s research has crucial implications for expository IS usage, training, and interpreting, and it sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses inherent in cross-linguistic, signed contact settings.
Webtoons—a form of comic that are typically published digitally in chapter form—are the latest manifestation of the Korean Wave of popular culture that has increasingly caught on across the globe, especially among youth. Originally distributed via the Internet, they are now increasingly distributed through smartphones to ravenous readers in Korea and around the world.
The rise of webtoons has fundamentally altered the Korean cultural market due to the growth of transmedia storytelling—the flow of a story from the original text to various other media platforms, such as films, television, and digital games—and the convergence of cultural content and digital technologies. Fans can enjoy this content anytime and anywhere, either purely as webtoons or as webtoon-based big-screen culture.
Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture analyzes webtoons through the lens of emerging digital cultures and discusses relevant cultural perspectives by combining two different, yet connected approaches, political economy and cultural studies. The book demonstrates the dynamics between structural forces and textual engagement in global media flows, and it illuminates snack-culture and binge-reading as two new forms of digital culture that webtoon platforms capitalize on to capture people’s shifting media consumption.
Webtoons—a form of comic that are typically published digitally in chapter form—are the latest manifestation of the Korean Wave of popular culture that has increasingly caught on across the globe, especially among youth. Originally distributed via the Internet, they are now increasingly distributed through smartphones to ravenous readers in Korea and around the world.
The rise of webtoons has fundamentally altered the Korean cultural market due to the growth of transmedia storytelling—the flow of a story from the original text to various other media platforms, such as films, television, and digital games—and the convergence of cultural content and digital technologies. Fans can enjoy this content anytime and anywhere, either purely as webtoons or as webtoon-based big-screen culture.
Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture analyzes webtoons through the lens of emerging digital cultures and discusses relevant cultural perspectives by combining two different, yet connected approaches, political economy and cultural studies. The book demonstrates the dynamics between structural forces and textual engagement in global media flows, and it illuminates snack-culture and binge-reading as two new forms of digital culture that webtoon platforms capitalize on to capture people’s shifting media consumption.
Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation is an introduction to the study of language and applied linguistics for students who have had a minimum of exposure to the discipline of linguistics. Using clear, easy-to-understand explanations and examples, this text avoids the in-depth theoretical coverage found in texts written for those who specialize in linguistics or SLA. As a result, this book is perfect for students whose chosen fields require them to be acquainted with the ways language works--such as future teachers, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists--but who do not intend to become linguists. The text is also suitable for English or ESL/EFL teachers who need a reference volume about various aspects of language, particularly as it applies to teaching. Each chapter includes research projects and further readings.
The third edition of Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation features a new design and reorganization. All content has been significantly revised and updated. Each chapter also debunks a common language myth and now incorporates exercises that, for prior editions, appeared in a supplementary workbook. Extra practice for students is available online, as is additional materials for teachers. (There is no workbook for the third edition.)
The conditions for sustainable growth and development are among the most debated topics in economics, and the consensus is that institutions matter greatly in explaining why some economies are more successful than others over time. Probing the long-term effects of early colonial differences on immigration policy, land distribution, and financial development in a variety of settings, Understanding Long-Run Economic Growth explores the relationship between economic conditions, growth, and inequality, with a focus on how the monopolization of resources by the political elite limits incentives for ordinary people to invest in human capital or technological discovery. Among the topics discussed are the development of credit markets in France, the evolution of transportation companies in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the organization of innovation in the United States.
Understanding Missouri’s Constitutional Government presents a case study in the foundations of state governments. The book provides a sweeping look at the constitutional foundations of the processes of Missouri government. Authors Richard Fulton and Jerry Brekke place Missouri within the context of our larger federal system while using the state’s constitution as a touchstone for the discussion of each element of state government.
Understanding Missouri’s Constitutional Government has a dual framework specifically designed to enhance the reader’s learning experience. First, the essential elements of government outlined in the constitution are introduced, and then analysis and interpretation of each of the document’s articles is covered. This organization permits readers to build an understanding of a particular element—for example, the legislature—by learning its fundamental organization, processes, and purposes in a straightforward manner. After gaining that primary perspective, the reader can use the formal analysis in the second section to explore interpretations of each article. Not only helpful to the general reader, this two-part structure makes the text especially useful in courses on American government, state and local governments, and particularly Missouri government and constitution.
In short, Understanding Missouri’s Constitutional Government is an approachable, valuable exposition on Missouri government as reflected in the day-to-day operations outlined in the Missouri constitution. It fills a significant gap in the literature on the interpretation, use, and operation of state constitutions. Since Missouri law dictates that all levels of education should teach government and constitution at the national and state levels, this book will be an indispensable resource for educators while serving as a valuable reference for journalists and public officials in the state.
Have you ever meant one thing, but said another? Reacted angrily when no offense was intended? Wished that the earth would open up and swallow you? Understanding Misunderstandings will help you get out and stay out of these difficulties.
Robert L. Young explains why many common types of misunderstandings arise and how they can be avoided or corrected. In the first part of the book, he breaks the process of misunderstanding down into stages, showing how it can occur when we misspeak, mishear, misinterpret, or react in inappropriate ways. In the second part, he expertly analyzes the kinds of misunderstandings that can arise from differences in culture, social class, race and ethnicity, and gender. Real-life examples illustrate many of the problems and solutions he describes.
Because misunderstanding can destroy friendships and marriages, wreck careers, and lead to clashes between whole segments of society, understanding and diffusing it is of the utmost importance. This reader-friendly book provides the practical guidance to do just that. Educators, business people, psychologists, parents—in fact, everyone who interacts with other people—will benefit from it.
“Muslim Americans are at a political crossroads,” write editors Brian Calfano and Nazita Lajevardi. Whereas Muslims are now widely incorporated in American public life, there are increasing social and political pressures that disenfranchise them or prevent them from realizing the American Dream. Understanding Muslim Political Life in America brings clarity to the social, religious, and political dynamics that this diverse religious community faces.
In this timely volume, leading scholars cover a variety of topics assessing the Muslim American experience in the post-9/11 and pre-Trump era, including law enforcement; identity labels used in Muslim surveys; the role of gender relations; recognition; and how discrimination, tolerance, and politics impact American Muslims.
Understanding Muslim Political Life in America offers an update and reappraisal of what we know about Muslims in American political life. The editors and contributors also consider future directions and important methodological questions for research in Muslim American scholarship.
Contributors include Matt A. Barreto, Alejandro Beutel, Tony Carey, Youssef Chouhoud, Karam Dana, Oz Dincer, Rachel Gillum, Kerem Ozan Kalkan, Anwar Manje, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, Dani McLaughlan, Melissa R. Michelson, Yusuf Sarfati, Ahmet Tekelioglu, Marianne Marar Yacobian, and the editors.
Understanding NAFTA was first published in 1993 as Continental Shift: Free Trade & the New North America. This edition includes a new introduction that brings the NAFTA story up through 1995.
In spite of an unprecedented period of growth and prosperity, the poverty rate in the United States remains high relative to the levels of the early 1970s and relative to those in many industrialized countries today. Understanding Poverty brings the problem of poverty in America to the fore, focusing on its nature and extent at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Looking back over the four decades since the nation declared war on poverty, the authors ask how the poor have fared in the market economy, what government programs have and have not accomplished, and what remains to be done. They help us understand how changes in the way the labor market operates, in family structure, and in social welfare, health, and education policies have affected trends in poverty. Most significantly, they offer suggestions for changes in programs and policies that hold real promise for reducing poverty and income inequality.
Privacy is one of the most important concepts of our time, yet it is also one of the most elusive. As rapidly changing technology makes information increasingly available, scholars, activists, and policymakers have struggled to define privacy, with many conceding that the task is virtually impossible.
In this concise and lucid book, Daniel J. Solove offers a comprehensive overview of the difficulties involved in discussions of privacy and ultimately provides a provocative resolution. He argues that no single definition can be workable, but rather that there are multiple forms of privacy, related to one another by family resemblances. His theory bridges cultural differences and addresses historical changes in views on privacy. Drawing on a broad array of interdisciplinary sources, Solove sets forth a framework for understanding privacy that provides clear, practical guidance for engaging with relevant issues.
Understanding Privacy will be an essential introduction to long-standing debates and an invaluable resource for crafting laws and policies about surveillance, data mining, identity theft, state involvement in reproductive and marital decisions, and other pressing contemporary matters concerning privacy.
Examining science as a rhetorical enterprise, this book seizes upon one scientific essay—"The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme"—and probes it from many angles. Written by prominent evolutionary theorists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin and first published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1979, the "Spandrels" article is both serious science and vivid prose. Applying methods inspired by Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ferdinand de Saussure, and others, the contributors employ a range of interpretive strategies. Stephen Jay Gould adds his own comments, and the full text of the essay "Spandrels" is reproduced as an appendix. Applying methods inspired by Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ferdinand de Saussure, and others, the contributors employ a range of interpretive strategies. Stephen Jay Gould adds his own comments, and the full text of the essay "Spandrels" is reproduced as an appendix.
Self-help groups have encountered fierce criticism as places where individuals join to share personal problems and to engage in therapeutic intervention without the aid of skilled professionals. These groups have flourished since the 1970s and continue to serve more people than professional therapy.
Yet these groups have been criticized as fostering a culture of whiners and victims, and not using professional help as needed. Thomasina Jo Borkman debunks this commonly held assessment, and also examines the reasons for these groups’ enduring popularity since the 1960s—more people attend these meetings (word?) than see professional therapists. What accounts for their success and popularity?
Understanding Self-Help / Mutual-Aid Groups is the first book to describe three stages of individual and group evolution that is part of this organization’s very structure; it also reconceptualizes participants’ interactions with professionals. The group as a whole, Borkman posits, draws on the life experiences of its membes to foster nurturing, support, and transformation through a “circle of sharing.” Groups create more positive and less stigmatizing “meaning perspectives” of the members’ problems than is available from professionals or lay folk culture.
Since the book’s first publication, significant constitutional changes have occurred, some even altering the very structure of state government itself. There have been dramatic veto battles, protracted budget wars, and other interbranch conflicts that have generated landmark constitutional rulings from the state courts. The new edition of this handy reference addresses many of the latest issues, including legislative term limits, Arizona’s new redistricting system, educational issues, like the controversial school voucher program, and the influence of special-interest money in the legislature. A total of 63 propositions have reached the ballot, spawning heated controversies over same-sex marriage, immigration, and other hot-button social issues.
This book is the definitive guide to Arizona government and serves as a solid introductory text for classes on the Arizona Constitution. Extensive endnotes make it a useful reference for professionals within the government. Finally, it serves as a tool for any engaged citizen looking for information about online government resources, administrative rules, and voter rights. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book belongs on every Arizonan’s bookshelf.
An authoritative guide to Arizona government— written in plain language!
How do laws make their way through the state legislature?
What are the specific powers of the governor?
How do the courts make public policy?
Can citizens change the constitution? A leading lawyer and college educator who was an assistant attorney general through six governors, Toni McClory has written a definitive guide to Arizona government that is as comprehensive as it is easy to understand. It provides a thorough explanation of the state's constitution and shows the impact that its unique features have had on the everyday operation of the state's political system. Thoroughly up to date and clearly written, this book belongs on every Arizonan's shelf. Much of the information it contains is based on original research compiled by the author from primary sources and draws on her direct experience with government processes, officials, and events. - For concerned citizens, it offers topics of special interest to voters—including facts about initiatives and referenda and a chapter on local government—and contains references to online government resources.
- For lawyers and business people, it makes available a brief yet sophisticated synopsis of state government along with a wealth of citations and supporting detail.
- For students and teachers, it offers an exceptionally readable introductory text that relies heavily on primary sources and features "pro and con" passages-examining both sides of important issues-that are designed to stimulate critical thinking. From administrative rules to water law, Understanding the Arizona Constitution is your complete guide to the inner workings of the state. It is an essential reference for today's citizens and tomorrow's leaders.
Illuminating key issues and reflecting the rapid growth of the field of arts and cultural policy, this book will be of interest to students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, to arts educators and management professionals, government agency and foundation officials, and researchers and academics in the cultural policy field.
To many observers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mexico appeared to be a modern nation-state at last assuming an international role through its participation in NAFTA and the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development). Then came the Zapatista revolt on New Year's Day 1994. Wearing ski masks and demanding not power but a new understanding of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, Subcomandante Marcos and his followers launched what may be the first "post" or "counter" modern revolution, one that challenges the very concept of the modern nation-state and its vision of a fully assimilated citizenry.
This book offers a new way of understanding the Zapatista conflict as a counteraction to the forces of modernity and globalization that have rendered indigenous peoples virtually invisible throughout the world. Placing the conflict within a broad sociopolitical and historical context, Nicholas Higgins traces the relations between Maya Indians and the Mexican state from the conquest to the present—which reveals a centuries-long contest over the Maya people's identity and place within Mexico. His incisive analysis of this contest clearly explains how the notions of "modernity" and even of "the state" require the assimilation of indigenous peoples. With this understanding, Higgins argues, the Zapatista uprising becomes neither surprising nor unpredictable, but rather the inevitable outcome of a modernizing program that suppressed the identity and aspirations of the Maya peoples.
Individual chapters are rich in descriptive details and resonate with the contributor-teachers' personal investment in teaching. John Murphy and Patricia Byrd have arranged these chapters in four thematic clusters, the first dealing with general purposes instruction, including workplace literacy, community-based ESL, and courses designed for rich recent immigrants; the second with the teaching of English as a foreign language; the third with university credit-bearing courses focused on the teaching of English for academic purposes; and the fourth with noncredit university-affiliated courses offered through intensive English programs.
The contributors represent a variety of educational settings and many different countries and include many of the most well-known researchers in the field.
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2004 — A Choice Outstanding Academic Book
From astronomy to zoology, the practice of science proceeds from scientific ways of thinking. These patterns of thought, such as defining and classifying, hypothesizing and experimenting, form the building blocks of all scientific endeavor. Understanding how they work is therefore an essential foundation for everyone involved in scientific study or teaching, from elementary school students to classroom teachers and professional scientists.
In this book, Steven Darian examines the language of science in order to analyze the patterns of thinking that underlie scientific endeavor. He draws examples from university science textbooks in a variety of disciplines, since these offer a common, even canonical, language for scientific expression. Darian identifies and focuses in depth on nine patterns—defining, classifying, using figurative language, determining cause and effect, hypothesizing, experimenting, visualizing, quantifying, and comparing—and shows how they interact in practice. He also traces how these thought modes developed historically from Pythagoras through Newton.
The United States has a debt problem—we owe more than $18 trillion while our gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in America, is only $17.5 trillion. To pay down the debt, some recommend austerity, cutting federal expenditures. Others suggest increasing taxes, especially on the wealthiest Americans. In Understanding the National Debt: What Every American Needs to Know, economic historian Carl Lane urges that the national debt must be addressed in ways beyond program cuts or tax increase alternatives, but change can only occur when more Americans understand what constitutes our debt and the problems it causes. The gross national debt is composed of two elements: the public debt and “intragovernment holdings.” The public debt consists of bonds, bills, and notes purchased by individuals, banks, insurance companies, hedge and retirement funds, foreign governments, and university endowments. Intragovernment holdings refers to money that the U.S. Treasury borrows from other parts of the government, principally Social Security and Medicare. This accounts for approximately a quarter of the gross national debt, but that is money that we owe to ourselves, not another entity. The more the government borrows, the less is available for private sector investment, creating a “squeeze” effect that inhibits economic growth. The most burdensome problem is the interest due each year on the debt. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar less for other purposes. Those elements of the federal budget which are termed “discretionary” suffer. The mandatory elements of the budget—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the interest on the debt—must be provided for, but defense and national security, education, energy, infrastructure repair and development, and other needs wind up with less. By understanding the national debt we have an opportunity to address our real debt challenge—its principal and interest.
Franz Rosenzweig, one of the century’s great Jewish thinkers, wrote his gem of a book in 1921 as a more accessible précis of his famous Star of Redemption. An elegant introduction to Rosenzweig’s “new thinking,” Understanding the Sick and the Healthy was written for a lay audience and takes the form of an ironic narrative about convalescence. With superb simplicity and beauty, it puts forth an important critique of the nineteenth-century German Idealist philosophical tradition and expresses a powerful vision of Jewish religion. Harvard’s Hilary Putnam provides a new introduction to this classic work for a contemporary audience.
“Today, more than three-quarters of a century after it was written, the critique of philosophy in this book is what makes it of such great interest. Critique of philosophy has been a central theme of twentieth-century philosophy, and many philosophers have attacked some of the targets that Rosenzweig attacked in his little book. Yet this early attack by a profound religious thinker is far more powerful and far more interesting than most.”—From the new Introduction by Hilary Putnam
Somalia has been devastated by a US-backed Ethiopian invasion and years of civil war, and it has long been without a central government. Against this background of violence, Somali academic Afyare Abdi Elmi, attempts to explain the multiple dimensions of the conflict and find a peace-building consensus.
Somalia is a failed state and a Muslim state. This combination means the West assumes that it will become a breeding ground for extremism. The country regularly hits the headlines as a piracy hotspot. This combination of internal division and outside interference makes for an intensely hostile landscape. Elmi shows that only by addressing the problem of the statelessness in the country can the long process of peace begin. He highlights clan identities, Islam and other countries in the region as the key elements in any peace-building effort.
This unique account from an author who truly understands Somalia should be required reading for students and academics of international relations and peace / conflict studies.
The first part of Understanding Theatre retraces the main steps that brought theater studies to make the transition from performance to the audience to their receptive act, giving proper attention to the documentary element. In the second part, de Marinis tests the new perspective of investigation on some fundamental innovative theatrical experiences of the twentieth century. In this way, the volume collects de Marinis’s essays—written for magazines, conference programs, and edited collections—from a span of almost thirty years and documents key post-semiological developments in how we understand theater today.
Understanding Tolstoy recreates Tolstoy’s lifelong artistic and spiritual journey, taking readers to the core of the writer’s world through nuanced close readings of his major novels and novellas. Andrew D. Kaufman’s broad and accessible analysis of Tolstoy’s work speaks to the ways in which Tolstoy, despite living in a manner far removed from the experiences of most modern-day Americans, is still applicable and contemporary.
From a reconstruction of Olenin’s search for truth in The Cossacks to an illuminating analysis of Hadji-Murat’s tragic last stand, Understanding Tolstoy brings to life the fascinating parallels between Tolstoy’s personal quest and his characters’ journeys. Whether writing about the ballrooms and battlefields of War and Peace or the spectrum of sexual and spiritual attachments in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy emerges as a vital, searching artist who continually grows and surprises us, yet is driven by a single, unchanging belief in universal human truths.
Understanding Tolstoy is a treasure trove of critical and philosophical insights that will appeal to Tolstoy aficionados of all kinds, from advanced scholars to undergraduate students. The book offers an eminently readable guide to those entering Tolstoy’s world for the first time or the tenth, and it invites them to grapple alongside the writer and his characters with the most urgent existential questions of our time, and all times.
"John Parry's Understanding Torture is an important contribution to our understanding of how torture fits within the practices and beliefs of the modern state. His juxtaposition of the often indeterminate nature of the law of torture with the very specific state practices of torture is both startling and revealing."
---Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities at Yale Law School and author of Sacred Violence
"Parry is effective in building, deploying, and supporting his argument . . . that the law does not provide effective protections against torture, but also that the law is in itself constitutive of a political order in which torture is employed to create---and to destroy or re-create---political identities.”
---Margaret Satterthwaite, Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and Associate Professor of Clinical Law, NYU School of Law
"A beautifully crafted, convincingly argued book that does not shy away from addressing the legal and ethical complexities of torture in the modern world. In a field that all too often produces simple or superficial responses to what has become an increasingly challenging issue, Understanding Torture stands out as a sophisticated and intellectually responsible work."
---Ruth Miller, Associate Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Creating a separate category for an intentionally narrow set of practices labeled and banned as torture, Parry argues, serves to normalize and legitimate the remaining practices that are "not torture." Consequently, we must question the hope that law can play an important role in regulating state violence.
Kosek traces the histories of forest extraction and labor exploitation in northern New Mexico, where Hispano residents have forged passionate attachments to place. He describes how their sentiments of dispossession emerged through land tenure systems and federal management programs that remade forest landscapes as exclusionary sites of national and racial purity. Fusing fine-grained ethnography with insights gleaned from cultural studies and science studies, Kosek shows how the nationally beloved Smokey the Bear became a symbol of white racist colonialism for many Hispanos in the region, while Los Alamos National Laboratory, at once revered and reviled, remade regional ecologies and economies. Understories offers an innovative vision of environmental politics, one that challenges scholars as well as activists to radically rework their understandings of relations between nature, justice, and identity.
This unique, comprehensive introduction to screenwriting offers practical advice for the beginning writer, whether college student or freelancer. Based on their experience as professional writers and as teachers in a large, successful screenwriting program at California State University, Northridge, the authors provide a progression of assignments at manageable screenwriting lengths for beginners. They lead students through development of a premise, treatment, stepsheet, and, finally, miniscreenplay—essential elements in writing a longer script.
A major feature of the text is the use of many example scenes from contemporary and classic American films, such as On the Waterfront, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Godfather, The Graduate, Tootsie, and more. Other scenes are drawn from international films and dramatic literature. The criticism of these scenes invites students to develop their own comparative models, while simultaneously providing exposure to the central analytical terms of good dramatic writing.
The authors also place screenwriting within the larger tradition of dramatic writing in order to put the beginning writer in touch with the wealth of art, experience, and practical ideas the drama contains. They provide an up-to-date, practical discussion of marketing and copywriting a screenplay, with addresses of relevant professional societies. Most importantly, they never offer an ill-advised shortcut or restrict students to only one way of thinking about a character, situation, or scene. In The Understructure of Writing for Film & Television, the student's thought and creativity are central.
“Poems that stick with you like a song that won’t stop repeating itself in your brain, poems whose cadences burrow into your bloodstream, orchestrating your breathing long before their sense attaches its hooks to your heart.”
—Washington Post on Captivity
In Undertones of War, one of the finest autobiographies to come out of World War I, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in combat. After enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, describing them as “murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes.”
All the horrors of trench warfare, all the absurdity and feeble attempts to make sense of the fighting, all the strangeness of observing war as a writer—of being simultaneously soldier and poet—pervade Blunden’s memoir. In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, he tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross.
Now back in print for American readers, the volume includes a selection of Blunden’s war poems that unflinchingly juxtapose death in the trenches with the beauty of Flanders’s fields. Undertones of War deserves a place on anyone’s bookshelf between Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That.
What happens to us when we die? What might the afterlife look like? For the ancient Greeks, the dead lived on, overseen by Hades in the Underworld. We read of famous sinners, such as Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock, and the fierce guard dog Kerberos, who was captured by Herakles. For mere mortals, ritual and religion offered possibilities for ensuring a happy existence in the beyond, and some of the richest evidence for beliefs about death comes from southern Italy, where the local Italic peoples engaged with Greek beliefs. Monumental funerary vases that accompanied the deceased were decorated with consolatory scenes from myth, and around forty preserve elaborate depictions of Hades’s domain.
For the first time in over four decades, these compelling vase paintings are brought together in one volume, with detailed commentaries and ample illustrations. The catalogue is accompanied by a series of essays by leading experts in the field, which provides a framework for understanding these intriguing scenes and their contexts. Topics include attitudes toward the afterlife in Greek ritual and myth, inscriptions on leaves of gold that provided guidance for the deceased, funerary practices and religious beliefs in Apulia, and the importance accorded to Orpheus and Dionysos. Drawing from a variety of textual and archaeological sources, this volume is an essential source for anyone interested in religion and belief in the ancient Mediterranean.
Scholars often read Sebald’s work as a project of cultural memory that aims to reevaluate Europe's past in the wake of the traumatic and complex events of the twentieth century. Sebald’s characters seek out the traces of Europe’s destructive history in strange places. They linger in disused train stations, pause before works of art, and return to childhood homes that turn out to be more foreign than any place they have visited. Underworlds of Memory demonstrates that these strange encounters with the past are based on central tropes of classical epic: the journey to the underworld, the encounter with a work of art, and the return to the homeland.
Sebald thus follows in the footsteps of German Jewish authors, including Peter Weiss, Siegfried Kracauer, and Jean Améry, who use these same epic tropes to reconsider the cultural memory of the Holocaust. Underworlds of Memory reads Sebald's works together with the works of these German Jewish authors and the classical epics of Homer and Virgil in order to describe and trace the origins of the unique intervention into cultural memory they embody.
Examining little-known policing archives in France, Senegal, and Cambodia, Jennifer Anne Boittin unearths the stories of hundreds of women labeled “undesirable” by the French colonial police and society in the early twentieth century. These “undesirables” were often women traveling alone, women who were poor or ill, women of color, or women whose intimate lives were deemed unruly. To refute the label and be able to move freely, they spoke out or wrote impassioned letters: some emphasized their “undesirable” qualities to suggest that they needed the care and protection of the state to support their movements, while others used the empire’s own laws around Frenchness and mobility to challenge state or societal interference. Tacking between advocacy and supplication, these women summoned intimate details to move beyond, contest, or confound surveillance efforts, bringing to life a practice that Boittin terms “passionate mobility.” In considering how ordinary women pursued autonomy, security, companionship, or simply a better existence in the face of surveillance and control, Undesirable illuminates pressing contemporary issues of migration and violence.
As a lucid explanation of capitalism that turns back the clock even further on its birth, The Undevelopment of Capitalism makes a significant contribution to the studies of capitalism, historical sociology, and theories of markets as economic and cultural institutions.
Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) was a public intellectual who played a pivotal role in shaping modern Japan’s cultural identity. A self-taught folk scholar and elite bureaucrat, he promoted folk studies in Japan. So extensive was his role that he has been compared with the fabled Grimm Brothers of Germany and the great British folklorist James G. Frazer (1854–1941), author of The Golden Bough. This monograph is only the second book-length English-language examination of Yanagita, and it is the first analysis that moves beyond a biographical account of his pioneering work in folk studies.
An eccentric but insightful critic of Japan’s rush to modernize, Yanagita offers a compelling array of rebuttals to mainstream social and political trends in his carefully crafted writings. Through a close reading of Yanagita’s interdisciplinary texts, which comment on a wide range of key cultural issues that characterized the first half of Japan’s twentieth century, Melek Ortabasi seeks to reevaluate the historical significance of his work. Ortabasi’s inquiry simultaneously exposes, discursively, some of the fundamental assumptions we embrace about modernity and national identity in Japan and elsewhere.
Undocumented Dominican Migration is the first comprehensive study of boat migration from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico. It brings together the interactive global, cultural, and personal factors that induce thousands of Dominicans to journey across the Mona Passage in attempts to escape chronic poverty. The book provides in-depth treatment of decision-making, experiences at sea, migrant smuggling operations, and U.S. border enforcement. It also explores several topics that are rare in migration studies. These include the psychology of migrant motivation, religious beliefs, corruption and impunity, procreation and parenting, compulsive recidivism after failed attempts, social values in relation to law, marriage fraud, and the use of false documents for air travel from Puerto Rico to the mainland United States.
Frank Graziano’s extensive fieldwork among migrants, smugglers, and federal agencies provides an authority and immediacy that brings the reader close to the migrants’ experiences. The exhaustive research and multidisciplinary approach, highly readable narrative, and focus on lesser-known emigrants make Undocumented Dominican Migration an essential addition to public and academic debates about migration.
Examining how undocumented migrants are using film, video, and other documentary media to challenge surveillance, detention, and deportation
As debates over immigration increasingly become flashpoints of political contention in the United States, a variety of advocacy groups, social service organizations, filmmakers, and artists have provided undocumented migrants with the tools and training to document their experiences.
In The Undocumented Everyday, Rebecca M. Schreiber examines the significance of self-representation by undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants, arguing that by centering their own subjectivity and presence through their use of documentary media, these migrants are effectively challenging intensified regimes of state surveillance and liberal strategies that emphasize visibility as a form of empowerment and inclusion. Schreiber explores documentation as both an aesthetic practice based on the visual conventions of social realism and a state-administered means of identification and control.
As Schreiber shows, by visualizing new ways of belonging not necessarily defined by citizenship, these migrants are remaking documentary media, combining formal visual strategies with those of amateur photography and performative elements to create a mixed-genre aesthetic. In doing so, they make political claims and create new forms of protection for migrant communities experiencing increased surveillance, detention, and deportation.
The Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA), passed in the small Rustbelt city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania in 2006, was a local ordinance that laid out penalties for renting to or hiring undocumented immigrants and declared English the city’s official language. The notorious IIRA gained national prominence and kicked off a parade of local and state-level legislative initiatives designed to crack down on undocumented immigrants.
In his cogent and timely book, UndocumentedFears, Jamie Longazel uses the debate around Hazleton’s controversial ordinance as a case study that reveals the mechanics of contemporary divide and conquer politics. He shows how neoliberal ideology, misconceptions about Latina/o immigrants, and nostalgic imagery of “Small Town, America” led to a racialized account of an undocumented immigrant “invasion,” masking the real story of a city beset by large-scale loss of manufacturing jobs.
Offering an up-close look at how the local debate unfolded in the city that set off this broader trend, Undocumented Fears makes an important connection between immigration politics and the perpetuation of racial and economic inequality.
Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist
Winner of the David Montgomery Award
Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Book Award
Winner of the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award
Winner of the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize
Winner of the Américo Paredes Book Award
“A deeply humane book.”
—Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects
“Necessary and timely…A valuable text to consider alongside the current fight for DACA, the border concentration camps, and the unending rhetoric dehumanizing Mexican migrants.”
—PopMatters
“A deep dive into the history of Mexican migration to and from the United States.”
—PRI’s The World
In the 1970s, the Mexican government decided to tackle rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions of Mexican men crossed into the United States to find work. They took low-level positions that few Americans wanted and sent money back to communities that depended on their support. They periodically returned to Mexico, living their lives in both countries. After 1986, however, US authorities disrupted this back-and-forth movement by strengthening border controls. Many Mexican men chose to remain in the United States permanently for fear of not being able to come back north if they returned to Mexico. For them, the United States became a jaula de oro—a cage of gold. Undocumented Lives tells the story of Mexican migrants who were compelled to bring their families across the border and raise a generation of undocumented children.
2023 SANA Book Award, Society for the Anthropology of North America
2023 Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book Award NACCS Tejas Foco Award for Non-Fiction, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
2022 Nonfiction Discovery Prize, Writers' League of Texas
An intimate portrayal of the hardships faced by an undocumented family navigating the medical and educational systems in the United States.
Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter’s health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutions we count on to care.
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos spent five years with Claudia. As she listened to Claudia’s experiences, she recalled her own mother’s story, another life molded by migration, the US-Mexico border, and the quest for a healthy future on either side. Witnessing Claudia’s struggles with doctors and teachers, we see how the education and medical systems enforce undocumented status and perpetuate disability. At one point, in the midst of advocating for her daughter, Claudia suddenly finds herself struck by debilitating pain. Claudia is lifted up by her comadres, sent to the doctor, and reminded why she must care for herself.
A braided narrative that speaks to the power of stories for creating connection, this book reveals what remains undocumented in the motherhood of Mexican women who find themselves making impossible decisions and multiple sacrifices as they build a future for their families.
How do you document the undocumented? UNDOCUMENTS both poses and attempts to answer this complex question by remixing the forms and styles of the first encyclopedia of the New World, the Florentine Codex, in order to tell a modern story of Greater Mexico. Employing a broad range of writing genres and scholarly approaches, UNDOCUMENTS catalogs, recovers, and erases documents and images by and about peoples of Greater Mexico from roughly the first colonial moment. This brave and bracing volume organizes and documents ancient New World Mexican peoples from the Florentine Codex (1592) to our current technology-heavy age, wherein modern lawmakers and powerful global figures desire to classify, deport, and erase immigrants and their experiences.
While grappling with anxiety and the physical and mental health consequences of the way the United States treats immigrant bodies, John-Michael Rivera documents and scrutinizes what it means to seek opportunities in America. With a focus on the poetics of Latinx documentality itself, this book is concerned with the complicated and at times contradictory ways peoples of Greater Mexico have been documented and undocumented within systems of colonial knowledges, and how these peoples have been rendered as specters of the bureaucratic state. Rivera takes us through the painful, anxiety-ridden, and complex nature of what it means to be documented or undocumented, and the cruelty married to each of these states of being.
An ethnography of the decolonization of Maya-ness.
On the Yucatán Peninsula today, undergraduates are inventing a new sense of being Maya by studying linguistics and culture in their own language: Maya. In this bold theoretical intervention informed by ethnographic research, Catherine R. Rhodes argues that these students are undoing the category of modernity itself. Created through colonization of the Americas, modernity is the counterpart to coloniality; the students, Rhodes suggests, are creating decoloniality’s companion: “demodernity.”
Disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, history, and archaeology invented “the Maya” as an essentialized ethnos in a colonial, modern mold. Undoing Modernity follows students and their teachers as they upset the seemingly stable ethnic definition of Maya, with its reliance on a firm dichotomy of Maya and modern. Maya linguistics does not prove that Maya is modern but instead rejects the Maya-ness that modernity built, while also fostering within the university an intellectual space in which students articulate identity on their own terms. An erudite and ultimately hopeful work of interdisciplinary scholarship that brings linguistic anthropology, Mesoamerican studies, and critical Indigenous studies into the conversation, Undoing Modernity dares to imagine the world on the other side of colonial/modern ideals of Indigeneity.
Exploring and conceptualizing practices, technologies, and politics of disconnecting
How do we think beyond the dominant images and imaginaries of connectivity? Undoing Networks enables a different connectivity: “digital detox” is a luxury for stressed urbanites wishing to lead a mindful life. Self-help books advocate “digital minimalism” to recover authentic experiences of the offline. Artists envision a world without the internet. Activists mobilize against the expansion of the 5G network.
If connectivity brought us virtual communities, information superhighways, and participatory culture, disconnection comes with privacy tools, Faraday shields, and figures of the shy. This book explores nonusage and the “right to disconnect” from work and from the excessive demands of digital capitalism.
Undoing Suicidism questions the belief that the best way to help suicidal people is through the logic of prevention. Alexandre Baril presents the thought-provoking argument that supporting assisted suicide for suicidal people could better prevent unnecessary deaths. Offering a new queercrip model of (assisted) suicide, he invites us to imagine what could happen if we started thinking about (assisted) suicide from an anti-suicidist and intersectional framework.
Baril provides a radical reconceptualization of (assisted) suicide and invaluable reflections for academics, activists, practitioners, and policymakers.
Undoing the Revolution looks at the way rural underclasses ally with out-of-power elites to overthrow their governments—only to be shut out of power when the new regime assumes control. Vasabjit Banerjee first examines why peasants need to ally with dissenting elites in order to rebel. He then shows how conflict resolution and subsequent bargains to form new state institutions re-empower allied elites and re-marginalize peasants.
Banerjee evaluates three different agrarian societies during distinct time periods spanning the twentieth century: revolutionary Mexico from 1910 to 1930; late-colonial India from 1920 until 1947; and White-dominated Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) from the mid-1960s to 1980. This comparative approach also allows examination of both the underclass need for elite participation and the variety of causes that elites use to incentivize peasant classes to participate, extending from religious-ethnic identity and common political targets to the peasants’ and elites’ own economic grievances.
Undoing the Revolution demonstrates that both international and domestic investors in cash crops, natural resources, and finance can ally with peasant rebels; and, after threatened or actual state collapse, they can bargain with each other to select new state institutions.
Au fil de ses recherches, Benjamin se rend à l’évidence : il faudra que son Livre des passages soit enrichi par des images. Une « documentation visuelle » se constitue bientôt, écrit-il, glanée pour l’essentiel dans les recueils du Cabinet des estampes de la Bibliothèque nationale où il travaille pendant son exil parisien. Une centaine de notes témoignent de cette collecte et conservent, enfermée dans leurs plis, la mention d’une ou de plusieurs images qui sont restées pour la plupart inconnues jusqu’ici.
Steffen Haug a voulu retrouver cette réserve enfouie. Gravures et dessins de presse, tracts, réclames, affiches et photographies, de Meryon et Grandville à Daumier, en passant par l’infinie cohorte anonyme et le tout-venant de la production visuelle à grand tirage du XIXe siècle : la moisson rapportée ici est surprenante. Elle invite à lire ou relire les Passages en faisant à l’image toute la place qu’elle occupe dans la pensée du dernier Benjamin, à l’heure où s’élaborent, sous la menace de temps assombris, son essai « L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique », le projet de livre sur Baudelaire ou ses « Thèses sur le concept d’histoire ».
“What if the end were as colorless as real / estate?” the speaker asks in Unearth. Poet Chad Davidson’s latest collection takes a hard look at our world as it collapses under numerous trials and tribulations. Fashioned mostly of elegiac poems, Unearth charts the way in which personal grief ripples out to meet and mirror larger systems of loss. The first section deals with local traumas and bereavements—the loss of pets, the disintegration of a friends’ marriage. These tragedies combine with more ominous, larger breakdowns in the second section until, in the final section, grief roils over into historical wickedness, institutionalized violence, and state-sanctioned wrath. Ultimately, “Even the mouth / of a volcano, from far away, / is beautiful.”
The poetry itself offers us vessels into which we can pour out our despair. To understand the failing earth, Davidson’s speaker cajoles us to see the pain at its roots. From the opening poem—a reluctant elegy for a mother—to the final eschatological survey, an ode to maddening violence and destruction on a global scale, this collection imagines a world in which private and public terrors feed on each other, ultimately growing to a fever pitch. An act of resistance, this collection gives voice to our deep-seated emotional pain and offers us constructive ways to deal with it.
Nobel Prize–winning physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–54) is known for his work on experimental particle and nuclear physics, quantum theory, and statistical mechanics, and for his particular ability to condense complicated problems into approximations for understanding and testing theory in a variety of scientific disciplines. Six of his graduate students went on to win their own Nobel Prizes.
Unearthing Fermi’s Geophysics opens a window onto two underrepresented facets of this extraordinary thinker: Fermi’s teaching and his contribution to the field of geophysics. Drawing on Fermi’s handwritten calculations and notes, many of which are reproduced here in photographic facsimile, physicists Gino Segrè and John Stack have reconstructed a coursebook of Fermi’s insights into the physics of a range of geological and atmospheric phenomena. From gravity on Earth to thermodynamics in the atmosphere, the physics of raindrops, the Coriolis effect in hurricanes, tidal physics, earthquakes and seismic waves, Earth’s magnetism, atmospheric electricity, and much more, Unearthing Fermi’s Geophysics reveals the hidden workings of the world above, around, and below us—and of the mind of a great scientist who was able to bring those physical workings to light.
The significance of these folksongs, Jassal argues, lies in their suggesting and hinting at themes, rather than directly addressing them: women sing what they often cannot talk about. Women's lives, their feelings, their relationships, and their social and familial bonds are persuasively presented in song. For the ethnographer, the songs offer an entry into the everyday cultures of marginalized groups of women who have rarely been the focus of systematic analytical inquiry.
Under the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act,individual Indians were issued title to land allotments while so-called “surplus”Indian lands were opened to non-Indian settlement. During the forty-seven years that the act remained in effect, American Indians lost an estimated 90 million acres of land—about two-thirds of the land they had held in 1887. Worse, the loss of control over the land left to them has remained an ongoing and insidious result.
Unearthing Indian Land traces the complex legacies of allotment, including numerous instructive examples of a policy gone wrong. Aside from the initial catastrophic land loss, the fractionated land ownership that resulted from the act’s provisions has disrupted native families and their descendants for more than a century. With each new generation, the owners of tribal lands grow in number and therefore own ever smaller interests in parcels of land. It is not uncommon now to find reservation allotments co-owned by hundreds of individuals.Coupled with the federal government’s troubled trusteeship of Indian assets,this means that Indian landowners have very little control over their own lands.
Illuminated by interviews with Native American landholders, this book is essential reading for anyone who is interested in what happened as a result of the federal government’s quasi-privatization of native lands.
The first major history of modern Chinese geology, Unearthing the Nation introduces the key figures in the rise of the field, as well as several key organizations, such as the Geological Society of China, and explains how they helped bring Chinese geology onto the world stage.
Unearthing the Underworld reveals the hidden world of rocks—the keepers of secrets of past environments, changing climates, and the pulse of life over billions of years. Even the most seemingly ordinary stone can tell us much about the history of this planet, opening vistas of ancient worlds of ice, raging floods, strange unbreathable atmospheres, and prehistoric worlds teeming with life. Remarkably, many types of rocks owe their existence to living organisms—from the remains of bodies of dead animals to rocks formed from rotting ancient forests, or even created by the activity of fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Anything but dull and uninteresting, rocks are intriguing portals that illuminate the secret underworld upon which we live.
In addition to analyzing what motivated these workers and reformers to create cross-class organizations, David Zonderman examines the internal tactical debates and external political pressures that fractured them, even as new alliances were formed, and shows how these influences changed over time. He describes what workers and reformers learned about politics and social change within these complex and volatile alliances, and speculates as to whether those lessons have relevance for activists and reformers today.
What emerges from this investigation is a narrative of progress and decline that spans nearly three-quarters of a century, as an ever-shifting constellation of associations debated the meaning of labor reform and the best strategy to secure justice for workers. But the quest for ideological consistency and organizational coherence was not easily achieved. By century's end, not only did Boston look dramatically different from its antebellum ancestor, but its labor reform alliances had lost some of their earlier openhearted optimism and stubborn resilience.
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