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b o y
Consuelo Wise
Omnidawn, 2024
A hybrid book-length poem in which the protagonist grapples with a great loss.
 
In this hybrid of lyric poetry and essay, Consuelo Wise utilizes repetition, fragmentation, and syntax to construct a form that repeatedly falls apart. Breaks in lines and fragmented stanzas are followed by accumulative rushes, slashes, brackets, and words pushed together.
 
Throughout this book-length poem, Wise composes a meditation and an investigation into loss and identity. Moving between sound and image, aggression and subtlety, b o y pries open memories that resist understanding but also refuse to be forgotten. Wise peels back layers of mourning, considering how it can be experienced as a personal, inherited, environmental, social, and historical phenomenon. Throughout, the protagonist in b o y reenvisions ways to process a great loss, listening closely and searching for words while “the earth is shaking and the silence is pressing down.” 
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Advances in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1996
This volume presents innovative research on issues of importance to the well-being of older persons: labor market behavior, health care, housing and living arrangements, and saving and wealth.

Specific topics include the effect of labor market rigidities on the employment of older workers; the effect on retirement of the availability of continuation coverage benefits; and the influence of the prospective payment system (PPS) on rising Medicare costs. Also considered are the effects of health and wealth on living arrangement decisions; the incentive effects of employer-provided pension plans; the degree of substitution between 401(k) plans and other employer-provided retirement saving arrangements; and the extent to which housing wealth determines how much the elderly save and consume.

Two final studies use simulations that describe the implications of stylized economic models of behavior among the elderly. This timely volume will be of interest to anyone concerned with the economics of aging.
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Analyses in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Analyses in the Economics of Aging summarizes a massive amount of new research on several popular and less-examined topics pertaining to the relationship between economics and aging. Among the many themes explored in this volume, considerable attention is given to new research on retirement savings, the cost and efficiency of medical resources, and the predictors of health events.

The volume begins with a discussion of the risks and merits of 401(k) plans. Subsequent chapters present recent analysis of the growth of Medicare costs; the different aspects of disability; and the evolution of health, wealth, and living arrangements over the life course. Keeping with the global tradition of previous volumes, Analyses in the Economics of Aging also includes comparative studies on savings behavior in Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States; an examination of household savings among different age groups in Germany; and a chapter devoted to population aging and the plight of widows in India.

Carefully compiled and containing some of the most cutting-edge research and analysis available, this volume should be of interest to any specialist or policymaker concerned with ongoing changes in savings and retirement behaviors.
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Developments in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2009

The number of Americans eligible to receive Social Security benefits will increase from forty-five million to nearly eighty million in the next twenty years. Retirement systems must therefore adapt to meet the demands of the largest aging population in our nation’s history. In Developments in the Economics of Aging, David A. Wise and a distinguished group of analysts examine the economic issues that will confront policy makers as they seek to design policies to protect the economic and physical health of these older Americans.

The volume looks at such topics as factors influencing work and retirement decisions at older ages, changes in life satisfaction associated with retirement, and the shift in responsibility for managing retirement assets from professional money managers of traditional pension plans to individual account holders of 401(k)s. Developments in the Economics of Aging also addresses the complicated relationship between health and economic status, including why health behaviors vary across populations and how socioeconomic measures correlate with health outcomes.

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Discoveries in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The oldest members of the Baby-Boomer generation are now crossing the threshold of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare with extensive and significant implications for these programs’ overall spending and fiscal sustainability. Yet the aging of the Baby Boomers is just one part of the rapidly changing landscape of aging in the United States and around the world.

The latest volume in the NBER’s Economics of Aging series, Discoveries in the Economics of Aging assembles incisive analyses of the most recent research in this expanding field of study. A substantive focus of the volume is the well-documented relationship between health and financial well-being, especially as people age. The contributors explore this issue from a variety of perspectives within the context of the changing demographic landscape. The first part of the volume explores recent trends in health measurement, including the use of alternative measurement indices. Later contributions explore, among other topics, alternate determinants of health, including retirement, marital status, and cohabitation with family, and the potential for innovations, interventions, and public policy to improve health and financial well-being.
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The Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1988

The Economics of Aging presents results from an ongoing National Bureau of Economic Research project. Contributors consider the housing mobility and living arrangements of the elderly, their labor force participation and retirement, the economics of their health care, and their financial status. The goal of the research is to further our understanding both of the factors that determine the well-being of the elderly and of the consequences that follow from an increasingly older population with longer individual life spans. Each paper is accompanied by critical commentary.

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Explorations in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2011

The next two decades will mark a new phase in the demographic transition of the United States as baby boomers become eligible for Social Security and Medicare. Drawing on evidence from the United States and other nations, Explorations in the Economics of Aging yields important new findings on how economic decisions by households and policy choices by governments will influence the effects of this demographic shift. It explores topics such as the implications of differential mortality rates by income on Social Security, the link between cognition and economic outcomes, and scale variations in self-reported work disability. This volume will be an important reference for economists and policymakers alike.

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Frontiers in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1998
As America's population ages, economic research related to the elderly becomes increasingly important to public policy.

Frontiers in the Economics in Aging directs attention to four topics: the role of retirement accounts, such as IRAs and 401(k)s in personal saving; the economics of health care; new advances in research methodology; and aging in relation to inequality. Some of the issues analyzed within these topics are the implications of rising personal retirement saving in recent years, how health and health insurance affect labor supply, and the effects of pensions on the distribution of wealth.

David Wise's lucid introduction provides an overview of each paper. In addition to this book's appeal for specialists and microeconomists, it offers immediately practical ideas and methods for shaping public policy. In fact, one of the papers in this volume, "The Taxation of Pensions: A Shelter Can Become a Trap," helped to spur new legislation that reformed laws on pension distribution.



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Inquiries in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1998
For over a decade, the National Bureau of Economic Research has sponsored the Economics of Aging Program, under the direction of David A. Wise. The program addresses issues that affect the well-being of individuals as they age and a society that is composed increasingly of older people.

Within the next twenty years, an unprecedented proportion of Americans will be over sixty-five. New research in the economics of aging is an essential element of understanding what the future holds for this aging population. Inquiries in the Economics of Aging presents both empirical papers that consider questions that are fundamental to public policy and more theoretical contributions that lay new groundwork for future research in the economics of aging.

Inquiries in the Economics of Aging provides a timely overview of some of the most important questions facing researchers on aging and outlines new techniques and models that may help to answer these questions. This important volume will be of great interest to specialists and policy makers as it paves the way for future analysis.

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Insights in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The fraction of the population over age sixty-five in many developed countries is projected to rise, in some cases sharply, in coming decades. This has drawn growing interest to research on the health and economic circumstances of individuals as they age. Many individuals are retiring from paid work, yet they are living longer than ever. Their well-being is shaped by their past decisions such as their saving behavior, as well as by current and future economic conditions, health status, medical innovations, and a rapidly evolving landscape of policy incentives and supports.
The contributions to Insights in the Economics of Aging uncover how financial, physical, and emotional well-being are integrally related. The authors consider the interactions between financial circumstances in later life, such as household savings and home ownership, physical circumstances such as health and disability, and emotional well-being, including happiness and mental health.
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Investigations in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2012

One of the most well-established relationships in the economics of aging is that between health and wealth. Yet this relationship is also changing in conjunction with a rapidly aging population as well as a broad evolution in how people live later in life.

Building on findings from earlier editions in this National Bureau of Economic Research series, Investigations in the Economics of Aging focuses on the changing financial circumstances of the elderly and the relationship of these circumstances to health and health care. Among the topics addressed are the significance of out-of-pocket health care costs, the effects of inflation on social security, and the impact of the recent financial crisis on Americans’ well-being. Encompassing new data and advances in research methodology, the developments presented in this volume will have important implications for economies worldwide.

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Issues in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1990
This companion volume to The Economics of Aging (1989) examines the economic consequences of an increasingly older population, focusing on the housing and living arrangements of the elderly, as well as their labor force participation and retirement.
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Pensions, Labor, and Individual Choice
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1985
In recent years a decline in the labor force participation of older workers has combined with rapid current and projected increases in the number of older Americans, producing major policy debates over looming "crises" in social security and, to a lesser extent, in the private pension system. That private system is playing an increasing role in the support of retired workers and promises to be the subject of increasing scrutiny by economists and policymakers alike.

Previous books on private pensions have largely neglected behavioral implications of the features of pension plans. The papers in this volume, developed from material presented at a recent National Bureau of Economic Research conference, address two aspects of the relation between varieties of labor coverage and participation in the labor force. First, age at retirement may be correlated with kind of pension coverage. The papers, in fact, provide strong evidence that individual decisions about when to retire are directly influenced by pension options. Second, pension plans usually impose a high cost on workers who change jobs, which suggests that pension coverage reduces instances of job change. Pensions, Labor, and Individual Choice quantifies these correlations and proposes a conceptual framework within which to view them.
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Perspectives on the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2004
This book investigates several important issues in the economics of aging, including the accumulation of wealth and the relationship between health and financial prosperity.

Examining the changes in savings behavior and investment priorities in the United States over the past few decades, contributors to the volume point to a dramatic shift from employer-managed, defined benefit pensions to employee-controlled retirement savings plans. Further, the legislative reforms of the 1980s and the booming stock market of the 1990s did their share to influence individual wealth accumulation patterns of Americans.

These studies also explore the relationship between health status and economic status. Considering issues like pension income and health, mortality, and medical care, contributors present evidence from the United States, Britain, South Africa, and Russia. The volume culminates with wide-ranging discussions on a number of key topics in the field including the innovations that have contributed to a decline in mortality rates; the various medical advances that have benefited populations over time; and the determinants of expenditures on health. The findings with regard to cross-sectional differences in health outcomes and health care utilization also pose troubling questions for policymakers seeking to democratize health care across regions and races.
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Public Sector Payrolls
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1987
An estimated one out of five employees in this country works for some branch of government. Because policies concerning the compensation of these employees rest on assumptions about the economic dynamics of the public sector, the issue of public sector employment is of vital importance in the analysis of the national economy. In Public Sector Payrolls, leading economists explore the independent and interdependent functioning of the public and private sectors and their effect on the economy as a whole.

The volume, developed from a 1984 National Bureau of Economic Research conference, focuses on various labor issues in military and other governmental employment. Several contributors discuss compensation in the armed forces and its relationship to that in the private sector, as well as the interaction between the military and the private sector in the employment of youth. This latter is of particular interest because studies of youth employment have generally ignored the important influence of military hiring practices on labor market conditions. In other contributions, the response of wages and employment in the public sector to economic conditions is analyzed, and a detailed study of government pension plans is presented. Also included is a theoretical and empirical analysis of comparable worth in the public sector from the viewpoint of analytical labor economics. The volume concludes with a look at public school teachers' salaries in the context of current debates over improving the quality of American education.

A valuable resource to policymakers, Public Sector Payrolls will be an important addition to research in the field of labor economics.
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Research Findings in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2010
The baby boom generation's entry into old age has led to an unprecedented increase in the elderly population. The social and economic effects of this shift are significant, and in Research Findings in the Economics of Aging, a group of leading researchers takes an eclectic view of the subject. Among the broad topics discussed are work and retirement behavior, disability, and their relationship to the structure of retirement and disability policies.

While choices about  when to retire are made by individuals, these decisions are influenced by a set of incentives, including retirement benefits and health care, and this volume includes cross-national analyses of the effects of such programs on these decisions. Furthermore, the volume also offers in-depth analysis of the effects of retirement plans, employer contributions, and housing prices on retirement. It explores well-established relationships among economic circumstances, health, and mortality, as well as the effects of poverty and lower levels of economic development on health and life satisfaction. By combining micro and macro evidence, this volume continues a tradition of expanding the research agenda on the economics of aging.
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Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World
Historical Trends in Mortality and Health, Employment, and Disability Insurance Participation and Reforms
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2012

In nearly every industrialized country, large aging populations and increased life expectancy have placed enormous pressure on social security programs—and, until recently, the pressure has been compounded by a trend toward retirement at an earlier age. With a larger fraction of the population receiving benefits, in coming decades social security in many countries may have to be reformed in order to remain financially viable.

This volume offers a cross-country analysis of the effects of disability insurance programs on labor force participation by older workers. Drawing on measures of health that are comparable across countries, the authors explore the extent to which differences in the labor force are determined by disability insurance programs and to what extent disability insurance reforms are prompted by the circumstances of a country’s elderly population.

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Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World
The Capacity to Work at Older Ages
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In recent years, the retirement age for public pensions has increased across many countries, and additional increases are in progress or under discussion in many more. The seventh stage of an ongoing research project studying the relationship between social security programs and labor force participation, Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: The Capacity to Work at Older Ages explores people’s capacity to work beyond the current retirement age. It brings together an international team of scholars from twelve countries—Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—to analyze this issue. Contributors find that many—but not all—individuals have substantial capacity to work at older ages. However, they also consider how policymakers might divide gains in life expectancy between years of work and retirement, as well as the main impediments to longer work life. They consider factors that influence the demand for older workers, as well as the evolution of health and disability status, which may affect labor supply from the older population.
 
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Studies in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Studies in the Economics of Aging is the fourth book in a series from the National Bureau of Economic Research that addresses economic issues in aging and retirement. Building on the research in The Economics of Aging (1989), Issues in the Economics of Aging (1990), and Topics in the Economics of Aging (1992), this volume examines elderly population growth and government spending, life expectancy and health, saving for retirement and housing values, aging in Germany and Taiwan, and the utilization of nursing home and other long-term care.
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Themes in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In the past few years, the economic ramifications of aging have garnered close attention from a group of NBER researchers led by David A. Wise. In this volume, Wise and his collaborators continue to analyze a nexus of age-related issues.

This volume begins by looking at the implications of private and public personal retirement plans, focusing in particular on the impact of 401(k) programs on retirement strategies in light of potential social security reform and factors such as annuitization and on asset accumulation. Next, the often-observed relationship between health and wealth is dissected from two different perspectives and correlated with striking increases in health-care spending over the past two decades, despite the improved health of older populations. The volume concludes with an investigation of the retirement effects of various social security provisions in both U.S. and German systems.

This carefully developed collection expands the current investigative focus and broadens the dialogue on a rapidly growing area of social and economic concern.

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front cover of Topics in the Economics of Aging
Topics in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The original essays and commentary in this volume—the third in a series reporting the results of the NBER Economics of Aging Program—address issues that are of particular importance to the well-being of individuals as they age and to a society at large that is composed increasingly of older persons. The contributors examine social security reform, including an analysis of the Japanese system; present the startling finding that the vast majority of people choose the wrong accumulation strategies for their pension plans; explore the continuing consequences of the decline in support of parents by children in the postwar period; investigate the relation between nursing home stays and the source of payment for the care; and offer initial findings on the implications of differences between developed and developing countries for understanding aging issues and determining appropriate directions for research.
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Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World
Disability Insurance Programs and Retirement
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Even as life expectancy in many countries has continued to increase, social security and similar government programs can provide strong incentives for workers to leave the labor force when they reach the age of eligibility for benefits. Disability insurance programs can also play a significant role in the departure of older workers from the labor force, with many individuals in some countries relying on disability insurance until they are able to enter into full retirement.      
           
The sixth stage of an ongoing research project studying the relationship between social security programs and labor force participation, this volume draws on the work of an eminent group of international economists to consider the extent to which differences in labor force participation across countries are determined by the provisions of disability insurance programs. Presented in an easily comparable way, their research covers twelve countries, including Canada, Japan, and the United States, and considers the requirements of disability insurance programs, as well as other pathways to retirement.
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Health Care Issues in the United States and Japan
David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Recent data show wide disparity between Japan and the United States in the effectiveness of their health care systems. Japan spends close to the lowest percentage of its gross domestic product on health care among OECD countries, the United States spends the highest, yet life expectancies in Japan are among the world’s longest. Clearly, a great deal can be learned from a comprehensive comparative analysis of health care issues in these two countries.

In Health Care Issues in the United States and Japan, contributors explore the structural characteristics of the health care systems in both nations, the economic incentives underlying the systems, and how they operate in practice. Japan’s system, they show, is characterized by generous insurance schemes, a lack of gatekeepers, and fee-for-service mechanisms. The United States’ structure, on the other hand, is distinguished by for-profit hospitals, privatized health insurance, and managed care. But despite its relative success, an aging population and a general shift from infectious diseases to more chronic maladies are forcing the Japanese to consider a model more closely resembling that of the United States.

In an age when rising health care costs and aging populations are motivating reforms throughout the world, this timely study will prove invaluable.

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American Historical Explanations
A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry
Gene Wise
University of Minnesota Press, 1980

American Historical Explanations was first published in 1980. 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.

In this new edition of American Historical Explanations,Gene Wise expands his examination of historical thinking to include the latest work in American Studies, the new social history, ethnography, and psychohistory. Wise asserts that historians address their subjects through an intervening set of assumptions, or what he calls "explanation forms," similar to the philosophical paradigms that Thomas Kuhn has found in scientific inquiry. Through analysis of historical-cultural texts (including the work of V. L. Parrington, Lionel Trilling, and Perry Miller) he defines the forms used by several groups of American historians and traces the process by which an old form breaks down and is replaced by a new set of assumptions. Throughout, he aims to study the process of change in the history of ideas. His conclusions extend beyond historiography and will be useful for those interested in literature, social sciences, and the arts.

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The Little Lead Soldier
Hugh D. Wise
Westholme Publishing, 2017
An Extraordinary Account from the Front Lines of World War I, Written at the Request of an American Officer’s Young Son
Arriving in France in April 1918, Col. Hugh D. Wise, commander of the U.S. 61st Infantry Division, held a precious object. It was a toy soldier given to him by his six-year-old son, Hugh, Jr. The boy had asked the little lead soldier to write him with news of his father. The colonel saw action in two of the most important campaigns the Americans fought, St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne, and the little lead soldier dutifully assured a boy thousands of miles away that his father was safe: “The men had been shelled, gassed, and raked by machine guns constantly: and undergone several intense bombardments; and made a difficult though successful attack; and had resisted a fierce counter-attack. They had dug trenches, moved, and dug again. All this time they had been without shelter, exposed to a cold driving rain and without warm food—They were wet, chilled, and tired when called upon for even greater ef­forts but they responded with the energy and spirit of fresh troops.” A treasured family heirloom, these wartime letters are presented for the first time along with letter from Colonel Wise to his wife, and engrossing historical context provided by his grandson, Hugh D. Wise, III. The Little Lead Soldier: World War I Letters from a Father to His Son is a remarkable story of how a father performed his dangerous duty while keeping a promise to his boy. 
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Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains
Comprehensive Guide
Kenneth Wise
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains is an essential guide to one of America’s most
breathtaking and rugged national parks. The second edition of this compellingly readable
and useful book is completely updated, giving outdoor enthusiasts the most current
information they need to explore this world-renowned wilderness.

Included here are facts on more than 125 official trails recognized by the Park Service.
Each one has its own setting, purpose, style, and theme, and author Kenneth Wise
describes them in rich and vivid detail. For every route, he includes a set of driving directions
to the trailhead, major points of interest, a schedule of distances to each one, a
comprehensive outline of the trail’s course, specifics about where it begins and ends, references
to the U.S. Geological Survey’s quadrangle maps, and, when available, historical
anecdotes relating to the trail. His colorful descriptions of the area’s awe-inspiring beauty
are sure to captivate even armchair travelers.

Organized by sections that roughly correspond to the seventeen major watersheds
in the Smokies, Wise starts in Tennessee and moves south into North Carolina, with
two major trails—the Lakeshore and the Appalachian—that traverse several watersheds
treated independently. Further enhancing the utility of this volume is the inclusion of the
Great Smoky Mountains’ official trail map as well as an informative introduction filled
with details about the geology, climate, vegetation, wildlife, human history, and environmental
concerns of the region.

A seasoned outdoorsman with more than thirty years of experience in the area and
codirector of the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project at the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville, Wise brings an exceptional depth of knowledge to this guide. Both experienced
hikers and novices will find this newly revised edition an invaluable resource for trekking in
the splendor of the Smokies.
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Best Short Hikes
Great Smoky Mountains
Kenneth Wise
University of Tennessee Press, 1997
The Best Short Hikes in the Great Smoky Mountains
Kenneth Wise and James Andrews
Located astride the Tennessee–North Carolina border, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park contains more than one hundred trails that trace eight hundred miles of rugged terrain. This fact is certain to bewilder any newcomer who might be eager to explore the Park’s backcountry but is unsure where to start. This book, intended as a beginner’s guide to hiking the Smokies, offers lively, informative descriptions of twenty-two trails that can be completed in a day or less.
For anyone who has yet to discover the beauty of the Smokies, the highest North American mountains east of the Mississippi, the trails described here offer a splendid introduction. Scenic overlooks at Mount Le Conte, Clingmans Dome, Gregory Bald, and other peaks are included along these pathways, as are some of the well-known waterfalls of the Park, such as Laurel Falls, Rainbow Falls, and Ramsay Cascades. In addition to vital data about the length of the trail, its elevation gain, and “how to get there,” each trail description is packed with interesting facts and Smoky Mountain lore. Detailed maps are also included. In their introduction, the authors provide a brief overview of the park’s history as well as useful tips for novice hikers.
The Authors: Kenneth Wise, an administrator at the University of Tennessee Library, Knoxville, has hiked in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for more than twenty years. He is the author of Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains: A Comprehensive Guide.
James Andrews,a partner in the firm of Andrews, Hudson & Wall, P.C., has hiked the Park trails for more than a decade. He is the coauthor, with Wise, of The Best Overnight Hikes in the Great Smoky Mountains.


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Mount Le Conte
Kenneth Wise
University of Tennessee Press, 2016

In print for the first time in fifty years, Mount Le Conte is a reissue of the important 1966 self-published memoir by Paul J. Adams (1901–1985), a well-known Tennessee naturalist and the first custodian of the Smoky Mountain’s majestic summit in the years before the area was declared a national park.

Appointed custodian of Mount Le Conte in 1925 by the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, Adams went to work immediately and spent a year making the camp suitable for overnight visitors. Mount Le Conte, a massive mile-high formation extending five miles from the main divide of the Great Smoky Mountains, with its rugged landscapes, rushing streams, and fecund forests, was considered a prime showplace in efforts to establish the Smokies as a national park.

In addition to an extensive introduction, the editors have augmented the original text of Mount Le Conte with several photographs and sketches gleaned from Adams’s personal papers, resulting in a fuller, more complete reconstruction of Adams’s role in establishing the camp that would later come to be known as Le Conte Lodge.

An important source on the fascinating history of Mount Le Conte in the pre-Park era, this book is a companion to the recently published Smoky Jack: The Adventures of a Dog and his Master on Mount Le Conte (University of Tennessee Press, 2016).

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Smoky Jack
Kenneth Wise
University of Tennessee Press, 2016
Paul Adams (1901-1985) was a well-known Tennessee naturalist. Anne Bridges and Ken Wise are codirectors of the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project. Bridges is associate professor at John C. Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. With Ken Wise and Russell Clement, she wrote Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1544-1934. Wise, professor at the John C. Hodges Library, is the author of Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains and coauthor of A National History of Mount Le Conte.
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Natural History Mount Le Conte
Kenneth Wise
University of Tennessee Press, 1998

Widely regarded as the crown jewel of the Great Smoky Mountains, Mount Le Conte harbors the greatest concentration of notable geological features in all of the Smokies. This unique book tells the history of the mountain, offering visitors a greater appreciation of its scenic splendor. 

Kenneth Wise and Ron Petersen combine their intimate knowledge of Le Conte with a wealth of scientific and historical information. Following introductory coverage of the mountain’s geologic history and human exploration, they follow the six main trails up the mountain—Alum Cave, Bullhead, Rainbow Falls, Trillium Gap, Brushy Mountain, and the Boulevard—and reveal each one to be not merely a path but also a rich source of historical and personal testimony. A final chapter covers the distinguishing features of the summit itself.

Along each route, the authors explain how the trail was developed and provide background for well-known landmarks, from Inspiration Point to Huggins Hell. They offer informative descriptions of the plants and wildlife indigenous to Mount Le Conte as well as observations on the effects of environmental changes on the landscape.

The book is illustrated with dozens of photographs, many of historic interest.

Kenneth Wise is an associate professor at the John C. Hodges Library and the author of Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains. Ron Petersen is a distinguished professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

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Aesthetics, Industry, and Science
Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society
M. Norton Wise
University of Chicago Press, 2018
On January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister received a request by a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psychophysics, members of this small but growing group—which soon included Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke, Werner Siemens, and Hermann von Helmholtz—established leading positions in what only thirty years later had become a new landscape of natural science. How was this possible? How could a bunch of twenty-somethings succeed in seizing the future?
 
In Aesthetics, Industry, and Science M. Norton Wise answers these questions not simply from a technical perspective of theories and practices but with a broader cultural view of what was happening in Berlin at the time. He emphasizes in particular how rapid industrial development, military modernization, and the neoclassical aesthetics of contemporary art informed the ways in which these young men thought. Wise argues that aesthetic sensibility and material aspiration in this period were intimately linked, and he uses these two themes for a final reappraisal of Helmholtz’s early work. Anyone interested in modern German cultural history, or the history of nineteenth-century German science, will be drawn to this landmark book.
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Growing Explanations
Historical Perspectives on Recent Science
M. Norton Wise
Duke University Press, 2004
For much of the twentieth century scientists sought to explain objects and processes by reducing them to their components—nuclei into protons and neutrons, proteins into amino acids, and so on—but over the past forty years there has been a marked turn toward explaining phenomena by building them up rather than breaking them down. This collection reflects on the history and significance of this turn toward “growing explanations” from the bottom up. The essays show how this strategy—based on a widespread appreciation for complexity even in apparently simple processes and on the capacity of computers to simulate such complexity—has played out in a broad array of sciences. They describe how scientists are reordering knowledge to emphasize growth, change, and contingency and, in so doing, are revealing even phenomena long considered elementary—like particles and genes—as emergent properties of dynamic processes.

Written by leading historians and philosophers of science, these essays examine the range of subjects, people, and goals involved in changing the character of scientific analysis over the last several decades. They highlight the alternatives that fields as diverse as string theory, fuzzy logic, artificial life, and immunology bring to the forms of explanation that have traditionally defined scientific modernity. A number of the essays deal with the mathematical and physical sciences, addressing concerns with hybridity and the materials of the everyday world. Other essays focus on the life sciences, where questions such as “What is life?” and “What is an organism?” are undergoing radical re-evaluation. Together these essays mark the contours of an ongoing revolution in scientific explanation.

Contributors. David Aubin, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, Richard Doyle, Claus Emmeche, Peter Galison, Stefan Helmreich, Ann Johnson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Ilana Löwy, Claude Rosental, Alfred Tauber

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Native Foods
Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History
Michael D. Wise
University of Arkansas Press, 2023
In Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History, Michael D. Wise confronts four common myths about Indigenous food history: that most Native communities did not practice agriculture; that Native people were primarily hunters; that Native people were usually hungry; and that Native people never developed taste or cuisine. Wise argues that colonial expectations of food and agriculture have long structured ways of seeing (and of not seeing) Native land and labor.

Combining original historical research with interdisciplinary perspectives and informed by the work of Indigenous food sovereignty advocates and activists, this study sheds new light on the historical roles of Native American cuisine in American history and the significance of ongoing colonial processes in present-day discussions about the place of Native foods and Native history in our evolving worlds of taste, justice, and politics.
 
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The Pursuit of Justice
The Military Moral Economy in the USA, Australia, and Great Britain - 1861-1945
Nathan Wise
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The Pursuit of Justice is the first book to examine three separate instances of soldiers risking their lives during wartime to protest injustices being perpetrated by military authorities: within the United States Army during the American Civil War, the Australian Imperial Force during World War I, and the British Army during World War II. Nathan Wise explores the three events in detail and reveals how-despite the vast differences in military forces, wars, regions of the world, and eras-the soldiers involved all shared a common sense of justice and responded in remarkably similar ways.
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"Good News from New England" by Edward Winslow
A Scholarly Edition
Kelly Wisecup
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
First published in 1624, Edward Winslow's Good News from New England chronicles the early experience of the Plimoth colonists, or Pilgrims, in the New World. For several years Winslow acted as the Pilgrims' primary negotiator with New England Algonquians, including the Wampanoag, Massachusett, and Narragansett Indians. During this period he was credited with having cured the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit, one of the colonists' most valuable allies, of an apparently life-threatening illness, and he also served as the Pilgrims' chief agent in England.

It was in the context of all of these roles that Winslow wrote Good News in an attempt to convince supporters in England that the colonists had established friendly relations with Native groups and, as a result, gained access to trade goods. Although clearly a work of diplomacy, masking as it did incidents of brutal violence against Indians as well as evidence of mutual mistrust, the work nevertheless offers, according to Kelly Wisecup, a more complicated and nuanced representation of the Pilgrims' first years in New England and of their relationship with Native Americans than other primary documents of the period.

In this scholarly edition, Wisecup supplements Good News with an introduction, additional primary texts, and annotations to bring to light multiple perspectives, including those of the first European travelers to the area, Native captives who traveled to London and shaped Algonquian responses to colonists, the survivors of epidemics that struck New England between 1616 and 1619, and the witnesses of the colonists' attack on the Massachusetts.
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Medical Encounters
Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures
Kelly Wisecup
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
The conquest and colonization of the Americas resulted in all kinds of exchanges, including the transmission of diseases and the sharing of medicines to treat them. In this book, Kelly Wisecup examines how European settlers, Native Americans, and New World Africans communicated medical knowledge in early America, and how the colonists represented what they learned in their literatures.

Against the prevailing view that colonial texts provide insight only into their writers' perspectives, Wisecup demonstrates that Europeans, Natives, and Africans held certain medical ideas in common, including a conception of disease as both a spiritual and a physical entity, and a belief in the power of special rituals or prayers to restore health. As a consequence, medical knowledge and practices operated as a shared form of communication on which everyone drew in order to adapt to a world of devastating new maladies and unfamiliar cures.

By signaling one's relation to supernatural forces, to the natural world, and to other people, medicine became an effective means of communicating a variety of messages about power and identity as well as bodies and minds. Native Americans in Virginia and New England, for example, responded to the nearly simultaneous arrival of mysterious epidemics and peoples by incorporating colonists into explanations of disease, while British American colonists emphasized to their audiences back home the value of medical knowledge drawn from cross-cultural encounters in the New World.
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Driving in Cars with Homeless Men
Stories
Kate Wisel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
A Library Journal Best Book of 2019
Finalist, 2019 Foreword Indies Award


Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a love letter to women moving through violence. These linked stories are set in the streets and the bars, the old homes, the tiny apartments, and the landscape of a working-class Boston. Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat collide and break apart like pool balls to come back together in an imagined post-divorce future. Through the gritty, unraveling truths of their lives, they find themselves in the bed of an overdosed lover, through the panting tongue of a rescue dog who is equally as dislanguaged as his owner, in the studio apartment of a compulsive liar, sitting backward but going forward in the galley of an airplane, in relationships that are at once playgrounds and cages. Homeless Men is the collective story of women whose lives careen back into the past, to the places where pain lurks and haunts. With riotous energy and rage, they run towards the future in the hopes of untangling themselves from failure to succeed and fail again.
 
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Nick Drake
Dreaming England
Nathan Wiseman-Trowse
Reaktion Books, 2013
 Since his death in 1974 at the age of twenty-six, singer-songwriter Nick Drake has gained a huge international audience and come to be thought of as the epitome of English romanticism. But while his small body of work has evoked poetic comparisons with Blake and Keats, closer inspection of Drake’s music reveals many global and cosmopolitan influences that confound his status as an archetypal English troubadour. In this book, Nathan Wiseman-Trowse unravels the myths surrounding Drake and his work and explores how ideas of Englishness have come to be intimately associated with the cult musician.
 
Probing deeply into Drake’s music for clues, Wiseman-Trowse finds hints of the English landscape that Drake would have wandered through during his lifetime, but he also uncovers traces of blues, jazz, and eastern mysticism that hint at a broader conception of English national identity in the late 1960s, one far removed from parochial nostalgia. Wiseman-Trowse then looks at how Drake’s music has been framed since his death, showing how Drake has been situated as a particular kind of English artist that integrates American counterculture, the English class system, and a nostalgic reimagining of the hippie era. An appealing story of folk music and English national identity, this book is essential reading for any fan of Nick Drake.
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The Voice of the Dawn
An Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation
Frederick Matthew Wiseman
University Press of New England, 2001
"[My] story is a sash woven of many strands of language. The first strand is the remembered wisdom of the Abenaki community. The second strand is our history and that of our relatives, written down by European, Native American, and Euroamerican observers. The third strand is what our Mother the Earth has revealed to us through the studies and writings of those who delve in her, the archaeologists and paleoecologists. The fourth strand is my own family history and its stories. The fifth strand is, of course, that which has come to me alone, stories which I create with my own beliefs and visions." So begins the first book about Abenaki history and culture written from the inside. Frederick Matthew Wiseman's extensive research and personal engagement breathe life into Voice of the Dawn, making it truly unique. Colin Calloway, Chair of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, writes, "Going beyond all previous works on the Abenakis, Wiseman draws on family and community knowledge in a way that none of those authors could, speaks from an avowedly Abenaki perspective, and addresses aspects and issues ignored in other works. Moreover, no one that I know of has done as much work in locating and regathering items of Western Abenaki material culture. The quality and quantity of illustrations alone make this an attractive book, as well as a valuable visual record of change and persistence over time. As someone personally and pivotally involved in the Abenaki renaissance, Wiseman brings the story up to date without closing it."
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Stations of the Lost
The Treatment of Skid Row Alcoholics
Jacqueline P. Wiseman
University of Chicago Press, 1979
When first published in 1970, Stations of the Lost won the C. Wright Mills Award for Best Book in the Area of Social Problems. The study considers the Skid Row alcoholic from two points of view, that of the alcoholic himself and that of the agents of social control who treat him. A major discovery of Wiseman's research was that Skid Row men spend only about one third of the year on Skid Row. The rest of the time is spent "making the loop"—going from Skid Row to city jail, to county jail, to the state mental hospital, to the missions, and back to Skid Row. While these facilities are designed to handle or rehabilitate Skid Row men, they are actually used by these men as a means of survival.
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Social Democracy in Manitoba
A History of the CCF/NDP
Nelson Wiseman
University of Manitoba Press, 1983
In this volume, Nelson Wiseman skilfully describes the history of the New Democratic Party in Manitoba, tracing the roots of the social democratic movement to the years of mass immigration and social unrest that preceded the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919.Drawing extensively on personal interviews, on the private papers and correspondence of party leaders and activists, and on archival materials, Wiseman portrays clearly the party's philosophy and leadership, its organization and inner workings, its electoral support, and its relations with other parties, with labour, and with farmers.
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The Adventures of Cancer Bitch
S. L. Wisenberg
University of Iowa Press, 2009
Wisenberg may have lost a breast, but she retained her humor, outrage, and skepticism toward common wisdom and most institutions. While following the prescribed protocols at the place she called Fancy Hospital, Wisenberg is unsparing in her descriptions of the fumblings of new doctors, her own awkward announcement to her students, and the mounds of unrecyclable plastic left at a survivors’ walk. Combining the personal with the political, she shares her research on the money spent on pink ribbons instead of preventing pollution, and the disparity in medical care between the insured and the uninsured. When chemotherapy made her bald, she decorated her head with henna swirls in front and an antiwar protest in back. During treatment, she also recorded the dailiness of life in Chicago as she rode the L, taught while one-breasted, and attended High Holiday services and a Passover seder.

Wisenberg’s writing has been compared to a mix of Leon Wieseltier and Fran Lebowitz, and in this book, she has Wieseltier’s erudition and Lebowitz’s self-deprecating cleverness: “If anybody ever offers you the choice between suffering and depression, take the suffering. And I don't mean physical suffering. I mean emotional suffering. I am hereby endorsing psychic suffering over depression.”

From The Adventures of Cancer Bitch:

I found that when you invite people to a pre-mastectomy party, they show up. Even those with small children. The kids were so young that they didn't notice that most of the food had nipples. . . . I talked to everyone—about what I'm not sure. Probably about my surgery. Everyone told me how well I looked. I felt giddy. I was going to go under, but not yet; I was going to be cut, but not yet; I was going to be bald, but not yet. As my friend who had bladder cancer says: The thing about cancer is you feel great until they start treating you for it.
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The Sweetheart Is In
S. L. Wisenberg
Northwestern University Press, 2001
The yearnings of a little sister, the hazy memories of a concentration camp liberator, and the romantic entanglements of political activists are portrayed in <i>The Sweetheart Is In</i>, S.L. Wisenberg's first collection of short stories. Each of these edgy, lyrical stories creates its own universe in the space of a few pages even while overlapping characters and themes.
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The Wandering Womb
Essays in Search of Home
S. L. Wisenberg
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

Even as a fourth-generation Jewish Texan, S. L. Wisenberg has always felt the ghost of Europe dogging her steps, making her feel uneasy in her body and in the world. At age six, she’s sure that she hears Nazis at her bedroom window and knows that after they take her away, she’ll die without her asthma meds. In her late twenties, she infiltrates sorority rush at her alma mater, curious about whether she’ll get a bid now. Later in life, she makes her first and only trip to the mikvah while healing from a breast biopsy (benign this time), prompting an exploration of misogyny, shame, and woman-fear in rabbinical tradition.

With wit, verve, blood, scars, and a solid dose of self-deprecation, Wisenberg wanders across the expanse of continents and combs through history books and family records in her search for home and meaning. Her travels take her from Selma, Alabama, where her Eastern European Jewish ancestors once settled, to Vienna, where she tours Freud’s home and figures out what women really want, and she visits Auschwitz, which—disappointingly—leaves no emotional mark.

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The Marriage of Contraries
Bernard Shaw’s Middle Plays
J. L. Wisenthal
Harvard University Press, 1974
This reading of Bernard Shaw focuses on his habit of seeing the world in terms of contraries, a habit related to his basic rejection of absolutes, his distaste for finality. The author examines nine of Shaw's finest plays: Man and Superman, Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Pygmalion, Misalliance, Heartbreak House, Saint Joan, and Back to Methuselah. The book takes seriously Shaw's claim that all of his characters are “right from their several points of view.” We are compelled to respect the qualities and values of opposing and very different characters in these plays, and we also have a sense of their complementary defects. J. L. Wisenthal's commentary sheds light on Shaw's techniques of portrayal as well as his dialectical habit of mind. This finely written essay is for all lovers of Shaw and the theater.
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Journalism Ethics
21 Essentials from Wars to Artificial Intelligence
Eric Wishart
Hong Kong University Press, 2024
A necessary guide to responsible journalism in a challenging media landscape.

This concise and authoritative work offers the latest guidance on journalism ethics for students and media professionals and will help empower news consumers to make informed decisions about the trustworthiness of their sources of information. It offers advice on all aspects of journalism ethics including accuracy and seeking the truth, representation of women, LGBTQ coverage, climate change, mental health, use of images, conflict reporting, elections, and how to use artificial intelligence. The author brings a unique perspective and depth of knowledge to the complex challenges facing journalists and news consumers in this era of fake news, disinformation, and artificial intelligence.
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Reading Clocks, Alla Turca
Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire
Avner Wishnitzer
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the project of modern state building began to gather momentum.  In Reading Clocks, Alla Turca, Avner Wishnitzer unravels the complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their self-consciously “modern” outlook and lifestyle. Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress and the former temporal patterns with the old political order.

Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer’s original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca breaks new ground in the study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding of the relationship between time and modernity.
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Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic
New Essays on Bertrand Russell's "The Problems of Philosophy"
Donovan Wishon
CSLI, 2015
Bertrand Russell, the recipient of the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of the most distinguished, influential, and prolific philosophers of the twentieth century. Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic brings together ten new essays on Russell’s best-known work, The Problems of Philosophy. These essays, by some of the foremost scholars of his life and works, reexamine Russell’s famous distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description,” his developing views about our knowledge of physical reality, and his views about our knowledge of logic, mathematics, and other abstract matters. In addition, this volume includes an editors’ introduction, which summarizes Russell’s influential book, presents new biographical details about how and why Russell wrote it, and highlights its continued significance for contemporary philosophy.
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The Rhythm of Thought
Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-Ponty
Jessica Wiskus
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.
 
More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.
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Christian Divination in Late Antiquity
Robert Wisniewski
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
In Late Antiquity, people commonly sought to acquire knowledge about the past, the present, and the future, using a variety of methods. While early Christians did not doubt that these methods worked effectively, in theory they were not allowed to make use of them. In practice, people responded to this situation in diverse ways. Some simply renounced any hope of learning about the future, while others resorted to old practices regardless of the consequences. A third option, however, which emerged in the fourth century, was to construct divinatory methods that were effective yet religiously tolerable. This book is devoted to the study of such practices and their practitioners, and provides answers to essential questions concerning this phenomenon. How did it develop? How closely were Christian methods related to older, traditional customs? Who used them and in which situations? Who offered oracular services? And how were they treated by the clergy, intellectuals, and common people?
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A Little Love in Big Manhattan
Two Yiddish Poets
Ruth R. Wisse
Harvard University Press, 1988

In the early decades of this century, the wave of immigration that brought nearly two million Jews from the Pale of Settlement to the United States included an extraordinary group of gifted Yiddish poets and writers, who came to be called Di Yunge (The Young). A Little Love in Big Manhattan tells the story of two of the Young’s most prominent figures—Mani Leib, a lyric poet intent on refining the hard facts of his life into works of enduring beauty, and Moishe Leib Halpern, for whom poetry had to be the expression of coarse and shattering reality.

Through a dual biography of these opposing personalities, Ruth Wisse describes the rich and vital cultural movement that embraced them both. She tells of the burst of creative energy exhibited by the young poets and intellectuals who, after a long day of manual labor, would congregate in the cafes of the Lower East Side for badinage, debate, and literary talk. They started literary journals and compiled anthologies of their writings, which found their way overseas and had a rejuvenating influence on Yiddish poetry abroad. Ironically, their achievement coincided with the decline of the language in which they wrote, so that Yiddish poetry came into its own in America at a time when the next generation could scarcely read it; there were no literary heirs.

Ruth Wisse presents modern Jews with a part of their lost inheritance, and also claims for the Yiddish poets a place in the American canon. The first book to present these poets as part of the history of immigrant Jews in America, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (the title is from a poem of Halpern’s) will appeal to readers of poetry and to people interested in facets of the intellectual and artistic atmosphere of the interwar period.

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The Modern Jewish Canon
A Journey Through Language and Culture
Ruth R. Wisse
University of Chicago Press, 2003
What makes a great Jewish book? In fact, what makes a book "Jewish" in the first place? Ruth R. Wisse eloquently fields these questions in The Modern Jewish Canon, her compassionate, insightful guide to the finest Jewish literature of the twentieth century. From Isaac Babel to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick, Wisse's The Modern Jewish Canon is a book that every student of Jewish literature, and every reader of great fiction, will enjoy.
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Module 19
Introducing EAC-CPF
Katherine M. Wisser
Society of American Archivists, 2017
Introduces the standard Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF) and situates it in the wider archival standards landscape.
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Gentleman in the Shadows
Benjamin C. Evans Jr. and the Central Intelligence Agency
Douglas A. Wissing
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2019
Gentleman in the Shadows is a biography of Benjamin C. Evans Jr., a Central Intelligence Agency executive who operated at the top levels of the U.S. intelligence community during the darkest days of the Cold War. After serving as a covert case officer in revolutionary Havana, Cuba, and then managing The Asia Foundation, a sprawling CIA front organization, Evans was promoted to the CIA headquarters’ seventh floor, where the executive directorate team managed world-changing intelligence missions. A socially adept administrator, Evans was the CIA Executive Secretary for seven Directors of Central Intelligence under four presidential administrations. Evans was part of the tumultuous period that included America’s crusade to democratize Occupied Japan, the Korean War, nuclear standoffs with the Soviet Union, the anti-Castro counterrevolutionary movement that climaxed in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Family Jewels furor after the CIA’s dirty secrets were revealed. Through his marriage, Evans was a member of America’s elite, which figured so prominently in the U.S. intelligence services. Born and raised in a prosperous family in Crawfordsville, Indiana, Evans was imbued with conservative Hoosier values that celebrated servant-leadership. Following his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Evans’s social savvy and encultured mores stood him in good stead in Occupied Japan, where he served as aide-de-camp to General Eugene Harrison, a decorated World War II intelligence officer and Occupation administrator. It was in Occupied Japan that Evans and the general’s stepdaughter, Jan King, fell in love, and later married. When President Harry Truman recognized he needed a foreign intelligence service, General Harrison was on the commission that established what came to be the CIA. Not too many years later, Harrison and his cohorts insured that his son-in-law Evans, by then a respected military intelligence officer, was offered a position in the agency.CIA families not uncommonly led double lives of sequestered thoughts, unasked questions, and intimate deception. An empathetic family man, Evans paid a psychological price for his emotionally isolated life in the clandestine service.Gentleman in the Shadows is a biography of Benjamin C. Evans Jr., a Central Intelligence Agency executive who operated at the top levels of the U.S. intelligence community during the darkest days of the Cold War. After serving as a covert case officer in revolutionary Havana, Cuba, and then managing The Asia Foundation, a sprawling CIA front organization, Evans was promoted to the CIA headquarters’ seventh floor, where the executive directorate team managed world-changing intelligence missions. A socially adept administrator, Evans was the CIA Executive Secretary for seven Directors of Central Intelligence under four presidential administrations. Evans was part of the tumultuous period that included America’s crusade to democratize Occupied Japan, the Korean War, nuclear standoffs with the Soviet Union, the anti-Castro counterrevolutionary movement that climaxed in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Family Jewels furor after the CIA’s dirty secrets were revealed. Through his marriage, Evans was a member of America’s elite, which figured so prominently in the U.S. intelligence services. Born and raised in a prosperous family in Crawfordsville, Indiana, Evans was imbued with conservative Hoosier values that celebrated servant-leadership. Following his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Evans’s social savvy and encultured mores stood him in good stead in Occupied Japan, where he served as aide-de-camp to General Eugene Harrison, a decorated World War II intelligence officer and Occupation administrator. It was in Occupied Japan that Evans and the general’s stepdaughter, Jan King, fell in love, and later married. When President Harry Truman recognized he needed a foreign intelligence service, General Harrison was on the commission that established what came to be the CIA. Not too many years later, Harrison and his cohorts insured that his son-in-law Evans, by then a respected military intelligence officer, was offered a position in the agency.CIA families not uncommonly led double lives of sequestered thoughts, unasked questions, and intimate deception. An empathetic family man, Evans paid a psychological price for his emotionally isolated life in the clandestine service.
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The Rise of Jonas Olsen
A Norwegian Immigrant’s Saga
Johannes Wist
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
The road to riches for the hero of this sweeping historical novel ends up being rockier than he initially expects. Norwegian immigrant Jonas Olsen arrives in late nineteenth-century Minneapolis with little money and less English. He quickly learns to reinvent himself—from laboring in sewer construction to building a successful dry goods business, from losing everything in a banking collapse to settling the Red River Valley. While an eminently likable character, Jonas can also be ruthless in his ambition to find success in America. 

The Rise of Jonas Olsen is at once an immigrant novel, business novel, political novel, and a western, offering a rich and panoramic view of Scandinavian immigrant life in the Upper Midwest. Wist combines realism and satire to depict the role Norwegian Americans played in the economic, political, and cultural life of the Upper Midwest. 

Originally published serially in the Norwegian-language newspaper the Decorah Posten in the 1920s, The Rise of Jonas Olsen illustrates an immigrant’s struggle to preserve his identity and heritage while striving to become fully accepted as an American. 

Johannes B. Wist (1864–1923) was a journalist and editor of the Decorah Posten from 1900 to 1923. 

Orm Øverland is professor of American literature at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the author of The Western Home: A Literary History of Norwegian America and Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 1870-1930

Todd W. Nichol is editor of the Norwegian-American Historical Association publication program. 

Published in cooperation with the Norwegian-American Historical Association.
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And Yet I Still Have Dreams
A Story of Certain Loneliness
Joanna Wiszniewicz
Northwestern University Press, 2004
And Yet I Still Have Dreams is a departure from many Holocaust memoirs and biographies. Based on interviews with "Alex," an anonymous survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and three concentration camps, the story follows him from his assimilated childhood to his coming to terms with his memories of the Holocaust as an older man. Alex is angry, pugnacious, and contemptuous of the stereotypes found in some survivor literature and honest about the shortcomings of other works.

The book provides a connection to seldom discussed aspects of the Holocaust: the gulf between rich and poor Jews and how this translated into everyday survival; the refusal by Alex to see himself or Jews in general as heroes or victims; his own self-absorption as a teen in the ghetto; and his "priviliged" family's near-indifference to the suffering of those around them. Alex paints a picture of complex and diverse Jewish society in prewar Poland, revealing how, many years later and despite his determine to leave it in the past, the burdens of memory--and the dreams--linger.
 
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From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting
The Labor Plays of Manny Fried
Barry B Witham
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020

Author Barry B. Witham reclaims the work of Manny Fried, an essential American playwright so thoroughly blacklisted after he defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1954, and again in 1964, that his work all but completely disappeared from the canon. Witham details Manny Fried’s work inside and outside the theatre and examines his three major labor plays and the political climate that both nurtured and disparaged their productions. Drawing on never-before-published interview materials, Witham reveals the details of how the United States government worked to ruin Fried’s career.
 
From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting includes the complete text of Fried’s major labor plays, all long out of print. In Elegy for Stanley Gorski, Fried depicts one of the many red-baiting campaigns that threatened countless unions in the wake of the Taft-Hartley Act and the collusion of the Catholic Church with these activities. In Drop Hammer, Fried tackles the issues of union dues, misappropriation, and potential criminal activities. In the third play, The Dodo Bird, perhaps his most popular, Fried achieves a remarkable character study of a man outsourced from his job by technology and plant closures.
 
Manny Fried’s plays portray the hard edges of capitalism and government power and illuminate present-day struggles with hostility to labor unions and the passage in several states of right-to-work laws. Fried had no illusions about the government’s determination to destroy communism and unionism—causes to which he was deeply committed.  
 
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Picasso and the Chess Player
Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and the Battle for the Soul of Modern Art
Larry Witham
University Press of New England, 2013
In the fateful year of 1913, events in New York and Paris launched a great public rivalry between the two most consequential artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The New York Armory Show art exhibition unveiled Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, a “sensation of sensations” that prompted Americans to declare Duchamp the leader of cubism, the voice of modern art. In Paris, however, the cubist revolution was reaching its peak around Picasso. In retrospect, these events form a crossroads in art history, a moment when two young bohemians adopted entirely opposite views of the artist, giving birth to the two opposing agendas that would shape all of modern art. Today, the museum-going public views Pablo Picasso as the greatest figure in modern art. Over his long lifetime, Picasso pioneered several new styles as the last great painter in the Western tradition. In the rarefied world of artists, critics, and collectors, however, the most influential artist of the last century was not Picasso, but Marcel Duchamp: chess player, prankster, and a forefather of idea-driven dada, surrealism, and pop art. Picasso and the Chess Player is the story of how Picasso and Duchamp came to define the epochal debate between modern and conceptual art—a drama that features a who’s who of twentieth-century art and culture, including Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol. In telling the story, Larry Witham weaves two great art biographies into one tumultuous century.
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Popularizing the Past
Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America
Nick Witham
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history.
 
What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history.
 
Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.
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Popularizing the Past
Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America
Nick Witham
University of Chicago Press, 2023

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history.
 
What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history.
 
Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.

[more]

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NAKED BEFORE GOD
UNCOVERING THE BODY IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND
BENJAMIN C. WITHERS
West Virginia University Press, 2003

At different times and in different places, the human form has been regarded in different ways. The Ancient Greeks thought it was the most admirable subject for art, whereas early Christians often viewed it as lascivious in our post-lapsarian state. With illustrations taken from manuscripts, statuary and literary, this is a fascinating collection of essays with much that will be new to scholars and general readers alike.

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Placing the Enlightenment
Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason
Charles W. J. Withers
University of Chicago Press, 2007

The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns.

Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition.

Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.

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Zero Degrees
Geographies of the Prime Meridian
Charles W. J. Withers
Harvard University Press, 2017

Space and time on earth are regulated by the prime meridian, 0°, which is, by convention, based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. But the meridian’s location in southeast London is not a simple legacy of Britain’s imperial past. Before the nineteenth century, more than twenty-five different prime meridians were in use around the world, including Paris, Beijing, Greenwich, Washington, and the location traditional in Europe since Ptolemy, the Canary Islands. Charles Withers explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0° longitude solved complex problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times.

Withers guides readers through the navigation and astronomy associated with diverse meridians and explains the problems that these cartographic lines both solved and created. He shows that as science and commerce became more global and as railway and telegraph networks tied the world closer together, the multiplicity of prime meridians led to ever greater confusion in the coordination of time and the geographical division of space. After a series of international scientific meetings, notably the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, Greenwich emerged as the most pragmatic choice for a global prime meridian, though not unanimously or without acrimony. Even after 1884, other prime meridians remained in use for decades.

As Zero Degrees shows, geographies of the prime meridian are a testament to the power of maps, the challenges of accurate measurement on a global scale, and the role of scientific authority in creating the modern world.

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Radio Spectrum Management
Management of the spectrum and regulation of radio services
David Withers
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1999
Vast numbers of radio systems are now in use, and with new users and new uses constantly emerging, these systems have the potential to interfere with each other.
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Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory
Deborah M. Withers
Intellect Books, 2010

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Navajo Kinship and Marriage
Gary Witherspoon
University of Chicago Press, 1996
The Navajo are one of the most studied people in the world; yet their social organization is one of the least well understood. In Navajo Kinship and Marriage, Gary Witherspoon, a fluent speaker of the Navajo language who lived among the Navajo for eight years, offers a new theoretical approach to kinship based on its cultural dimensions. Witherspoon makes a primary distinction between culture (patterns for behavior) and the system of social relations (observable patterns of behavior) in this definitive work on Navajo kinship and marriage.

"Witherspoon . . . clarifies problems pertaining to Navajo kinship and marriage through his skillful use of the concepts of cultural and social systems. He adds to the body of knowledge on the Navajo by his own fieldwork and unique life experiences." —R. S. Freed, Sociology

"Not only can Witherspoon's book on Navajo kinship help unravel the web for the Anglo willing to concentrate, it can also bring to Navajo readers an understanding of why Anglos don't understand Navajo family relationships." —Joanne Reuter, Navajo Times

"This is an important work on Navajo kinship and marriage." —David F. Aberle, American Anthropology
 
[more]

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Administrative Implementation of Civil Rights
Joseph Parker Witherspoon
University of Texas Press, 1968

The civil rights problem of the mid-twentieth century was one of the greatest challenges to the American social fabric since the Civil War. Riots in scores of cities, and serious intergroup tensions and conflicts in thousands more, underlined the seriousness of the problem.

Administrative Implementation of Civil Rights examines the role, operation, and contribution of the device most often relied on by local and state governments for dealing with intergroup problems—the human- relations commission. First used in the early 1940s to deal with discrimination against blacks, this commission was later often charged with implementing the civil rights of other minority groups and of women, the elderly, the handicapped, and the poor. It is Joseph Parker Witherspoon’s thesis that the human-relations commission was not used effectively, that an agency of this type has great strengths that most local and state governments did not utilize, and that its weaknesses are susceptible of remedy and must be eliminated. He explains these weaknesses and develops proposals for correcting them.

 Witherspoon examines the roles of the local, state, and federal governments in solving this country’s complicated and serious civil rights problem and demonstrates that a program that carefully coordinates action by the federal government with action by local and state governments could be made to work effectively. As a part of this demonstration he proposes the enactment of a new form of comprehensive civil rights legislation at local, state, and national levels, and presents a series of four model statutes—the Alpha Model Acts—for effectuating his proposals. The approach emphasized in these statutes greatly strengthens the role of the human-relations commission as a law-enforcement agency and, in particular, focuses the operation of federal and state action upon life in the individual community.

 The book concludes with a group of appendices listing all state and many local commissions and agencies handling human-relations problems at that time, and summarizing the type of authority, the jurisdiction, the operating budget, and the legislative basis for each. This list will be of interest to those studying the history of civil rights and public policy in the United States.

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Assassins’ Deeds
A History of Assassination from Ancient Egypt to the Present Day
John Withington
Reaktion Books, 2020
Assassins have been killing the powerful and famous for at least three thousand years. Personal ambition, revenge, and anger have encouraged many to violent deeds, like the Turkish sultan who had nineteen of his brothers strangled or the bodyguards who murdered a dozen Roman emperors. More recently have come new motives like religious and political fanaticism, revolution and liberation, with governments also getting in on the act, while many victims seem to have been surprisingly careless: Abraham Lincoln was killed after letting his bodyguard go for a drink. So, do assassinations work? Drawing on anecdote, historical evidence, and statistical analysis, Assassins’ Deeds delves into some of history’s most notorious acts, unveiling an intriguing cast of characters, ingenious methods of killing, and many unintended consequences.
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Flood
Nature and Culture
John Withington
Reaktion Books, 2013
From the flood that remade the earth in the Old Testament to the 1931 China floods that killed almost four million people, from the broken levees in New Orleans to the almost yearly rising waters of rivers like the Mississippi, floods have many causes: rain, melting ice, storms, tsunamis, failures of dams and levees, acts of vengeful gods. They have been used as deliberate acts of war to cause thousands of casualties. Flooding kills far more people than any other natural disaster. In this cultural and natural history of floods, John Withington tells stories of the deadliest floods the world has seen while also exploring the role of the deluge in religion, mythology, literature, and art.
 
Withington describes how aspects of floods—the power of nature, human drama, changed landscapes—have fascinated artists, novelists, and filmmakers. He examines the ancient, catastrophic flood that appears in many religions and cultures and considers how the symbol of the flood has become a key icon in world literatures and a component of the contemporary disaster movie. Withington also depicts how humans try to defend themselves against these merciless encroaching waters and discusses the increasing danger floods pose in a future beset by climate change. Filled with illustrations, Flood offers a fascinating overview of our relationship with one of humanity’s oldest and deadliest foes.
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front cover of A History of Fireworks from Their Origins to the Present Day
A History of Fireworks from Their Origins to the Present Day
John Withington
Reaktion Books, 2024
Bursting with images from across time, a sparkling chronicle of rockets, pinwheels, and more.
 
This book illuminates the glittering history of fireworks, from their mysterious beginnings to the dazzling big-budget displays of today. It describes how they enthralled the world’s royal courts and became a sensation across the British Empire. There are stories of innovations like “living fireworks,” fiercely fought international competitions, and the technology behind modern showpieces viewed by millions. Practitioners say fireworks are an art, and they have inspired artists from Shakespeare, Handel, Dickens, and Whistler to Katy Perry. But John Withington also covers fireworks’ practical uses—rescues at sea, attempts to control the weather—while not ignoring their dangers, accidents, or efforts to make them safer.
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Secrets of the Centenarians
What is it Like to Live for a Century and Which of Us Will Survive to Find Out?
John Withington
Reaktion Books, 2017
In October 1995, a blind, deaf, French grandmother broke a world record. Jeanne Calment became, so far as we know, the oldest human being who has ever lived when she reached the age of 120 years and 238 days. She went on to survive for nearly three more years—dying in 1997 at 122 years and 164 days. On the long journey to her record-breaking age, Madame Calment acquired more and more company. The United States today has more centenarians than any other country, and they are the fastest-growing section of the population, with at least fourteen times as many centenarians as there were sixty years ago. Secrets of the Centenarians delves into the intriguing background of this incredible increase.

In the book, John Withington explores the factors that determine who among us will reach one hundred and who will not. Is it determined by lifestyle or by genetics or by geography? Why do women outnumber men so heavily among centenarians? What kind of life can you expect if you reach one hundred? Is surviving that long a blessing or a curse? Withington answers these questions and more, along the way telling stories of celebrity centenarians like the comedians Bob Hope and George Burns, songwriter Irving Berlin, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Britain’s Queen Mother, and the scientist who invented LSD. Finally, Withington explores whether—even if the number of centenarians keeps increasing—there remains a maximum life span beyond which we cannot survive.

Thoughtful, well-researched, and highly entertaining, Secrets of the Centenarians reveals some of the most intriguing secrets of growing older.
 
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Storm
Nature and Culture
John Withington
Reaktion Books, 2016
Gales, cyclones, blizzards, tornados, and hurricanes—few things demonstrate the awesome power of nature like a good storm. Devastating, diverse, and sometimes appearing completely out of nowhere, storms are also a source of both scientific and aesthetic wonder. In this book, John Withington takes an in-depth and unique look at the nature of storms and the impact that they have—both physical and cultural—on our lives.
            Withington shows how storms have changed the course of human history. From Roman times to the modern day, he shows how their devastating effects have wiped out entire communities, changed the fates of battle, and even reset the entire planet. He also shows how beneficial they have been to us: as an important feature of our atmosphere and climate, but also as a source of inspiration for nearly every artist who has ever lived, from Homer to Rembrandt, in works from the Old Testament to Robinson Crusoe. Beautifully illustrated, this book offers a fascinating look at Earth’s most fearsome events.
 
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Heidegger on Being Uncanny
Katherine Withy
Harvard University Press, 2015

There are moments when things suddenly seem strange—objects in the world lose their meaning, we feel like strangers to ourselves, or human existence itself strikes us as bizarre and unintelligible. Through a detailed philosophical investigation of Heidegger’s concept of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit), Katherine Withy explores what such experiences reveal about us. She argues that while others (such as Freud, in his seminal psychoanalytic essay, “The Uncanny”) take uncanniness to be an affective quality of strangeness or eeriness, Heidegger uses the concept to go beyond feeling uncanny to reach the ground of this feeling in our being uncanny.

Heidegger on Being Uncanny answers those who wonder whether human existence is fundamentally strange to itself by showing that we can be what we are only if we do not fully understand what it is to be us. This fundamental finitude in our self-understanding is our uncanniness. In this first dedicated interpretation of Heidegger’s uncanniness, Withy tracks this concept from his early analyses of angst through his later interpretations of the choral ode from Sophocles’s Antigone. Her interpretation uncovers a novel and robust continuity in Heidegger’s thought and in his vision of the human being as uncanny, and it points the way toward what it is to live well as an uncanny human being.

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Lost
Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America
Shannon Withycombe
Rutgers University Press, 2019
2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

In Lost, medical historian Shannon Withycombe weaves together women’s personal writings and doctors’ publications from the 1820s through the 1910s to investigate the transformative changes in how Americans conceptualized pregnancy, understood miscarriage, and interpreted fetal tissue over the course of the nineteenth century. Withycombe’s pathbreaking research reveals how Americans construed, and continue to understand, miscarriage within a context of reproductive desires, expectations, and abilities. This is the first book to utilize women’s own writings about miscarriage to explore the individual understandings of pregnancy loss and the multiple social and medical forces that helped to shape those perceptions. What emerges from Withycombe’s work is unlike most medicalization narratives. 
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The Witkiewicz Reader
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Forgotten during the Stalin years, Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939) was rediscovered in his native Poland only after the liberalization of 1956, when his works came to play a major role in freeing the arts from socialist realism. This collection, the first anthology in English, presents Witkiewicz in the full range of his creative and intellectual activities. The Witkiewicz Reader includes excerpts from three novels; four complete plays; letters to Malinowski; and selections from aesthetic, social, and philosophical essays detailing Witkiewicz's theory of Pure Form, his metaphysical system, and his apocalyptic view of the fate of civilization.
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Insatiability
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Witkiewicz's 1927 masterpiece, made famous in Polish dissident and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz's The Captive Mind, is one of the most unforgettable depictions of the tensions and trade-offs between ideological loyalty and individual conscience in world literature. Futuristic, experimental, and remarkably prophetic, Insatiability traces the choices of a young Pole as his divided nation both opposes and welcomes a communitarian invasion from the east offering a narcotic that both removes anxieties and induces obedience. An anti-Utopian classic, it foretold the irresoluble and sometimes deadly choices that faced Eastern European thinkers, writers, and politicians during the years of Soviet domination.
 
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Hijacking the Agenda
Economic Power and Political Influence
Christopher Witko
Russell Sage Foundation, 2021
Why are the economic interests and priorities of lower- and middle-class Americans so often ignored by the U.S. Congress, while the economic interests of the wealthiest are prioritized, often resulting in policies favorable to their interests? In Hijacking the Agenda, political scientists Christopher Witko, Jana Morgan, Nathan J. Kelly, and Peter K. Enns examine why Congress privileges the concerns of businesses and the wealthy over those of average Americans. They go beyond demonstrating that such economic bias exists to illuminate precisely how and why economic policy is so often skewed in favor of the rich.
 
The authors analyze over 20 years of floor speeches by several hundred members of Congress to examine the influence of campaign contributions on how the national economic agenda is set in Congress. They find that legislators who received more money from business and professional associations were more likely to discuss the deficit and other upper-class priorities, while those who received more money from unions were more likely to discuss issues important to lower- and middle-class constituents, such as economic inequality and wages. This attention imbalance matters because issues discussed in Congress receive more direct legislative action, such as bill introductions and committee hearings. While unions use campaign contributions to push back against wealthy interests, spending by the wealthy dwarfs that of unions. 
 
The authors use case studies analyzing financial regulation and the minimum wage to demonstrate how the financial influence of the wealthy enables them to advance their economic agenda. In each case, the authors examine the balance of structural power, or the power that comes from a person or company’s position in the economy, and kinetic power, the power that comes from the ability to mobilize organizational and financial resources in the policy process. The authors show how big business uses its structural power and resources to effect policy change in Congress, as when the financial industry sought deregulation in the late 1990s, resulting in the passage of a bill eviscerating New Deal financial regulations. Likewise, when business interests want to preserve the policy status quo, it uses its power to keep issues off of the agenda, as when inflation eats into the minimum wage and its declining purchasing power leaves low-wage workers in poverty. Although groups representing lower- and middle-class interests, particularly unions, can use their resources to shape policy responses if conditions are right, they lack structural power and suffer significant resource disadvantages. As a result, wealthy interests have the upper hand in shaping the policy process, simply due to their pivotal position in the economy and the resulting perception that policies beneficial to business are beneficial for everyone.
 
Hijacking the Agenda is an illuminating account of the way economic power operates through the congressional agenda and policy process to privilege the interests of the wealthy and marks a major step forward in our understanding of the politics of inequality.
 
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Eleven-Inch
Michal Witkowski
Seagull Books, 2021
What does it take to succeed as a queer teenage Eastern European sex worker in the 1990s? Eleven inches and a ruthless attitude.

Western Europe, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall: Two queer teens from Eastern Europe journey to Vienna, then Zurich, in search of a better life as sex workers. They couldn’t be more different from each other. Milan, aka Dianka, a dreamy, passive naïf from Slovakia, drifts haplessly from one abusive sugar daddy to the next, whereas Michał, a sanguine pleasure-seeker from Poland, quickly masters the selfishness and ruthlessness that allow him to succeed in the wild, capitalist West—all the while taking advantage of the physical endowment for which he is dubbed “Eleven-Inch.” By turns impoverished and flush with their earnings, the two traverse a precarious new world of hustler bars, public toilets, and nights spent sleeping in train stations and parks or in the opulent homes of their wealthy clients. With campy wit and sensuous humor, Michał Witkowski explores in Eleven-Inch the transition from Soviet-style communism to neoliberal capitalism in Europe through the experiences of the most marginalized: destitute queers. 
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Marine Macroecology
Jon D. Witman
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Pioneered in the late 1980s, the concept of macroecology—a framework for studying ecological communities with a focus on patterns and processes—revolutionized the field. Although this approach has been applied mainly to terrestrial ecosystems, there is increasing interest in quantifying macroecological patterns in the sea and understanding the processes that generate them. Taking stock of the current work in the field and advocating a research agenda for the decades ahead, Marine Macroecology draws together insights and approaches from a diverse group of scientists to show how marine ecology can benefit from the adoption of macroecological approaches.

Divided into three parts, Marine Macroecology first provides an overview of marine diversity patterns and offers case studies of specific habitats and taxonomic groups. In the second part, contributors focus on process-based explanations for marine ecological patterns. The third part presents new approaches to understanding processes driving the macroecolgical patterns in the sea. Uniting unique insights from different perspectives with the common goal of identifying and understanding large-scale biodiversity patterns, Marine Macroecology will inspire the next wave of marine ecologists to approach their research from a macroecological perspective.

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Here and Everywhere Else
Small-Town Maine and the World
Andrew Witmer
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Winner of the 2023 New England Society Book Award in the Historical Nonfiction category
Winner of an Award of Excellence, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH)

In 1822, settlers pushed north from Massachusetts and other parts of New England into Monson, Maine. On land taken from the Penobscot people, they established prosperous farms and businesses. Focusing on the microhistory of this village, Andrew Witmer reveals the sometimes surprising ways that this small New England town engaged with the wider world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Townspeople fought and died in distant wars, transformed the economy and landscape with quarries and mills, and used railroads, highways, print, and new technologies to forge connections with the rest of the nation.

Here and Everywhere Else starts with Monson’s incorporation in the early nineteenth century, when central Maine was considered the northern frontier and over 90 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas; it ends with present-day attempts to revive this declining Maine town into an artists’ colony. Engagingly written, with colorful portraits of local characters and landmarks, this study illustrates how the residents of this remote place have remade their town by integrating (and resisting) external influences.

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Equal Before the Law
How Iowa Led Americans to Marriage Equality
Tom Witosky
University of Iowa Press, 2015
“We’ve been together in sickness and in health, through the death of his mother, through the adoption of our children, through four long years of this legal battle,” Jason Morgan told reporters of himself and his partner, Chuck Swaggerty. “And if being together through all of that isn’t love and commitment or isn’t family or isn’t marriage, then I don’t know what is.” Just minutes earlier on that day, April 3, 2009, the justices of the Iowa Supreme Court had agreed.

The court’s decision in Varnum v. Brien made Iowa only the third state in the nation to permit same-sex couples to wed—moderate, midwestern Iowa, years before such left-leaning coastal states as California and New York. And unlike the earlier decisions in Massachusetts and Connecticut, Varnum v. Brien was unanimous and unequivocal. It catalyzed the unprecedented and rapid shift in law and public opinion that continues today.

Equal Before the Law tells the stories behind this critical battle in the fight for marriage equality and traces the decision’s impact. The struggle began in 1998 with the easy passage of Iowa’s Defense of Marriage Act and took a turn, surprising to many, in 2005, when six ordinary Iowa couples signed on to Lambda Legal’s suit against the law. Their triumph in 2009 sparked a conservative backlash against the supreme court justices, three of whom faced tough retention elections that fall.
Longtime, award-winning reporters Tom Witosky and Marc Hansen talked with and researched dozens of key figures, including opponent Bob Vander Plaats, proponents Janelle Rettig and Sharon Malheiro, attorneys Roger Kuhle, Dennis Johnson, and Camilla Taylor, and politicians Matt McCoy, Mary Lundby, and Tom Vilsack, who had to weigh their careers against their convictions. Justice Mark Cady, who wrote the decision, explains why the court had to rule in favor of the plaintiffs. At the center of the story are the six couples who sacrificed their privacy to demand public respect for their families.

Through these voices, Witosky and Hansen show that no one should have been surprised by the 2009 decision. Iowans have a long history of leadership on civil rights. Just a year after Iowa became a state, its citizens adopted as their motto the phrase, “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” And they still do today.
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Traces of Gold
California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature
Nicolas S. Witschi
University of Alabama Press, 2001

Artfully demonstrates the linkage of American literary realism to the texts, myths, and resources of the American West

From Gold Rush romances to cowboy Westerns, from hard-boiled detective thrillers to nature writing, the American West has long been known mainly through hackneyed representations in popular genres. But a close look at the literary history of the West reveals a number of writers who claim that their works represent the “real” West. As Nicolas Witschi shows, writers as varied as Bret Harte, John Muir, Frank Norris, Mary Austin, and Raymond Chandler have used claims of textual realism to engage, replicate, or challenge commonly held assumptions about the West, while historically acknowledged realists like William Dean Howells and Mark Twain have often relied on genre-derived impressions about the region.


The familiar association of the West with nature and the “great outdoors” implies that life in the West affords an unambiguous relationship with an unalloyed, non-human, real nature. But through a combination of textual scholarship, genre criticism, and materialist cultural studies, Witschi complicates this notion of wide-open spaces and unfettered opportunity. The West has been the primary source of raw materials for American industrial and economic expansion, especially between the California Gold Rush and World War II, and Witschi argues that the writers he examines exist within the intersections of cultural and material modes of production. Realistic depictions of Western nature, he concludes, must rely on the representation of the extraction of material resources like minerals, water, and oil.

With its forays into ecocriticism and cultural studies, Traces of Gold will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, American studies, and western history.


 
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Architects of Little Rock
1833-1950
Charles Witsell
University of Arkansas Press, 2014
Architects of Little Rock provides biographical and historical sketches of the architects working in Little Rock from 1830 to 1950. Thirty-five architects are profiled, including George R. Mann, Thomas Harding, Charles L. Thompson, Max. F. Mayer, Edwin B. Cromwell, George H. Wittenberg, Lawson L. Delony, and others. Readers will learn who these influential professionals were, where they came from, where they were educated, how they lived, what their families were like, how they participated in the life of the city, and what their buildings contributed to the city. Famous buildings, including the Historic Arkansas Museum, the Old State House, the Arkansas State Capitol, St. Andrews Cathedral, Little Rock City Hall, the Pulaski County Court House, Little Rock Central High School, and Robinson Auditorium are showcased, bringing attention to and encouraging appreciation of the city’s historic buildings.

Published in collaboration with the Fay Jones School of Architecture.
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Democracy against Development
Lower-Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India
Jeffrey Witsoe
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Hidden behind the much-touted success story of India’s emergence as an economic superpower is another, far more complex narrative of the nation’s recent history, one in which economic development is frequently countered by profoundly unsettling, and often violent, political movements. In Democracy against Development, Jeffrey Witsoe investigates this counter-narrative, uncovering an antagonistic relationship between recent democratic mobilization and development-oriented governance in India.
            
Witsoe looks at the history of colonialism in India and its role in both shaping modern caste identities and linking locally powerful caste groups to state institutions, which has effectively created a postcolonial patronage state. He then looks at the rise of lower-caste politics in one of India’s poorest and most populous states, Bihar, showing how this increase in democratic participation has radically threatened the patronage state by systematically weakening its institutions and disrupting its development projects. By depicting democracy and development as they truly are in India—in tension—Witsoe reveals crucial new empirical and theoretical insights about the long-term trajectory of democratization in the larger postcolonial world. 
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Orchids in Your Pocket
A Guide to the Native Orchids of Iowa (10-pack)
Bill Witt
University of Iowa Press, 2006
10-PACK IN A POP DISPLAYFrom 1843, when the first collections were made, until 1987, when an amateur botanist discovered the only known Iowa site for spring ladies tresses, thirty-two species of orchids have been recorded in Iowa. The state’s wild orchids range in size from the three-inch-tall delicately blossomed nodding pogonia of the eastern woodlands to the three-foot-tall floral spike of the western prairie fringed orchid and in color from whites and pale pastels to buttery yellows and passionate pinks. Flower shapes run the gamut, too, from the tight-lipped parsimony of the fall coral-root to the cheerful roundness of the yellow lady’s-slipper.Along with superb color photographs of all thirty-two species, this latest addition to Iowa’s series of laminated guides includes common and scientific names, habitat (prairie, woodland, wetland) and distribution, height, approximate time of blooming, status, and potential for hybridization. Bill Witt devotes a separate panel to species missing and presumed extirpated; photos of orchids from nearby states illustrate these lost species. Because orchids have highly specific requirements for germination, growth, and reproduction, the conversion of natural lands for agricultural development has resulted in such loss of habitat that all but a handful of orchid species are now considered threatened or endangered; two orchid species are now known to live in just one site each; and three species have likely been wiped out. Orchids in Your Pocket is a welcome reminder of the beauty and fragility of these native species and their prairie, woodland, and wetland homes.
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Enchanted by Prairie
Bill Witt
University of Iowa Press, 2009
June grass at sunset, Indian grass at sunrise, hawk moths and monarch butterflies nectaring on purple fringed orchids and rough blazing star, little bluestem and saw-tooth sunflowers and butterfly milkweed in hill prairies and sand prairies, and blue skies and one bright rainbow arching over them all. Bill Witt has been photographing Iowa’s wild places for more than thirty years, and the result is this collection of splendid images that reveal the glorious beauty and diversity of the state’s prairie remnants.

Witt gives us close-ups of pasque flower shoots covered with ice in spring, coneflowers dancing in a summer breeze, and prairie dropseed in its autumn colors as well as such prairie companions as sandhill cranes, northern harriers, and bison. His panoramic visions of prairie landscapes in all seasons focus on the personal pleasure and spiritual sustenance that connecting with prairies, even small and neglected ones, can bring us. Osha Davidson’s essay compares today’s prairie remnants with yesterday’s expanses and calls for us to restore balance to this damaged landscape. Altogether, Enchanted by Prairie celebrates today’s prairie landscape and encourages us, in Davidson’s words, to restore its “beauty and scents and textures and sounds.”
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Black Hunger
Soul Food And America
Doris Witt
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Explores the complex relationship between food and African American history

In 1889, the owners of a pancake mix witnessed the vaudeville performance of a white man in blackface and drag playing a character called Aunt Jemima. This character went on to become one of the most pervasive stereotypes of black women in the United States, embodying not only the pancakes she was appropriated to market but also post–Civil War race and gender hierarchies—including the subordination of African American women as servants and white fantasies of the nurturing mammy.

Using the history of Aunt Jemima as a springboard for exploring the relationship between food and African Americans, Black Hunger focuses on debates over soul food since the 1960s to illuminate a complex web of political, economic, religious, sexual, and racial tensions between whites and blacks and within the black community itself. Celebrated by many African Americans as a sacramental emblem of slavery and protest, soul food was simultaneously rejected by others as a manifestation of middle-class black “slumming.”

Highlighting the importance of food for men as well as women, Doris Witt traces the promotion of soul food by New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne and its prohibition by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad and comedian-turned-diet guru Dick Gregory. A discussion of cookbook author Vertamae Grosvenor, who distanced herself from the myth of plantation mammy by reimagining soul food as "vibration cooking," sets the stage for Witt's concluding argument that the bodies and appetites of African American women should be viewed as central to contemporary conversations about eating disorders and reproductive rights.

Witt draws on vaudeville, literature, film, visual art, and cookbooks to explore how food has been used both to perpetuate and to challenge racial stereotypes. Raising her fist in a Black Power salute, wielding her spatula like a sword, Aunt Jemima steps off the pancake box in a righteous fury.

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The Accidental Republic
Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law
John Fabian Witt
Harvard University Press, 2004

In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation’s exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen’s organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen’s compensation.

John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginnings of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical paths. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.

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Patriots and Cosmopolitans
Hidden Histories of American Law
John Fabian Witt
Harvard University Press, 2007

Ranging widely from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the little-known stories of five patriots and critics. He shows how law and constitutionalism have powerfully shaped and been shaped by the experience of nationhood at key moments in American history.

Founding Father James Wilson's star-crossed life is testament to the capacity of American nationhood to capture the imagination of those who have lived within its orbit. For South Carolina freedman Elias Hill, the nineteenth-century saga of black citizenship in the United States gave way to a quest for a black nationhood of his own on the West African coast. Greenwich Village radical Crystal Eastman became one of the most articulate critics of American nationhood, advocating world federation and other forms of supranational government and establishing the modern American civil liberties movement. By contrast, the self-conscious patriotism of Dean Roscoe Pound of Harvard Law School and trial lawyer Melvin Belli aimed to stave off what Pound and Belli saw as the dangerous growth of a foreign administrative state.

In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape and constrain the directions of legal change. Yet their engagements with American nationhood remade the institutions and ideals of the United States even as the national tradition shaped and constrained the course of their lives.

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Tell
Love, Defiance, and the Military Trial at the Tipping Point for Gay Rights
Major Margaret Witt
University Press of New England, 2017
In 1993 Margie Witt, a young Air Force nurse, was chosen as the face of the Air Force’s “Cross into the Blue” recruitment campaign. This was also the year that President Clinton’s plan for gays to serve openly in the military was quashed by an obdurate Congress, resulting in the blandly cynical political compromise known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Contrary to its intent, DADT had the perverse effect of making it harder for gay servicemen and -women to fight expulsion. Over the next seventeen years more than 13,000 gay soldiers, sailors, marines, coast guard, and airmen and -women were removed from military service. That is, until Margie Witt’s landmark case put a stop to it. Tell is the riveting story of Major Margaret Witt’s dedicated and decorated military career as a frontline flight nurse, and of her love and devotion to her partner—now wife—Laurie Johnson. Tell captures the tension and drama of the politically charged legal battle that led to the congressional repeal of the controversial law and helped pave the way for a suite of landmark political and legal victories for gay rights. Tell is a testament to the power of love to transform hearts and minds, as well as a celebration of the indomitable spirit of Major Witt, her wife Laurie, her dedicated legal team, and the brave men and women who came forward to testify on her behalf in a historic federal trial. “The name Margaret Witt may join the canon of US civil rights pioneers.” —Guardian “Major Witt’s trial provided an unparalleled opportunity to attack the central premise of [Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell] . . . and set an important precedent.”— New York Times “A landmark ruling.”—Politico
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Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE)
Michael Witt
American Library Association, 2010

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Spectrum and Network Measurements
Robert A. Witte
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014
This updated edition of the industry's classic text combines the theory, practice, and latest technology of spectrum and network measurements in electronic systems to offer a comprehensive and easy way to understand frequency domain measurements.
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Spectrum and Network Measurements
Robert A. Witte
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2001
This book covers the theory and practice of spectrum and network measurements in electronic systems. Intended for readers who have a background in electrical engineering and use spectrum or network analyzers to characterize electronic signals or systems, this classic volume successfully consolidates the pertinent theory into one comprehensive treatment of frequency domain measurements. Witte's thorough coverage of critical concepts, such as Fourier analysis, transmission lines, intermodulation distortion, signal-to-noise ratio and S-parameters enables the reader to understand the basic theory of signals and systems, relate it to measured results, and apply it when creating new designs.
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A Rhetoric of Doing
Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy
Stephen P Witte
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

Concerned with both the nature and the practice of discourse, the eighteen essays collected here treat rhetoric as a dynamic enterprise of inquiry, exploration, and application, and in doing so reflect James L. Kinneavy’s firm belief in the vital relationship between theory and practice, his commitment to a spirit of accommodation and assimilation that promotes the development of ever more powerful theories and ever more useful practices.

A thorough introduction provides the reader with clear summaries of the essays by leading-edge theorists, researchers, and teachers of writing and rhetoric. A "field context" for the ideas presented in this book is provided through the division of the various chapters into four major sections that focus on classical rhetoric and rhetorical theory in historical contexts; on dimensions of discourse theory, aspects of discourse communities, and the sorts of knowledge people access and use in producing written texts; on writing in school-related contexts; and on several dimensions of nonacademic writing. A fifth section contains a bibliographic survey and an appreciation of James Kinneavy’s work. The exceptional range of these essays makes A Rhetoric of Doing an ecumenical examination of the current state of mind in rhetoric and written communication, a survey and description of what discourse and those in the field of discourse are, in fact, doing.

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The Media Players
Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News
Stephen Wittek
University of Michigan Press, 2015
The Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News builds a case for the central, formative function of Shakespeare’s theater in the news culture of early modern England. In an analysis that combines historical research with recent developments in public sphere theory, Dr. Stephen Wittek argues that the unique discursive space created by commercial theater helped to foster the conceptual framework that made news possible.

Dr. Wittek’s analysis focuses on the years between 1590 and 1630, an era of extraordinary advances in English news culture that begins with the first instance of serialized news in England and ends with the emergence of news as a regular, permanent fixture of the marketplace. Notably, this period of expansion in news culture coincided with a correspondingly extraordinary era of theatrical production and innovation, an era that marks the beginning of commercial theater in London, and has left us with the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton.
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Rush's Lancers
The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry in the Civil War
Eric J. Wittenberg
Westholme Publishing, 2007
The Complete Story of a Legendary Civil War Unit
The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry, also known as Rush’s Lancers, was a completely volunteer unit and one of the finest regiments to serve in the Civil War. Tracing their history from George Washington’s personal bodyguard during the Revolutionary War, many of the men of the Sixth Pennsylvania were the cream of Philadelphia society, including Richard H. Rush, grandson of Dr. Benjamin Rush, Maj. Robert Morris, Jr., great-grandson of the financier of the Revolutionary War, Capt. Charles Cadwalader, whose great-grandfather was a general under George Washington, Frank H. Furness, architect and Medal of Honor recipient, and George G. Meade, Jr. But it was their actions in battle, not their illustrious family histories, that distinguished Rush’s Lancers. The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry earned a reputation for being a highly trained and reliable unit, despite being armed initially with antiquated weapons, leaving their mark on key battlefields, including Antietam, Fredericksburg, Hanover Court House, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Brandy Station—where they conducted one of the most famous charges of the war—and Appomattox.
    Drawing upon letters, diaries, memoirs, service and pension files, contemporary newspaper coverage, official records, and other primary sources, Rush’s Lancers: The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry in the Civil War by distinguished military historian Eric J. Wittenberg is an engrossing account of these young men from both Philadelphia’s social elite and the city’s working classes who, despite not being professional soldiers, answered the Nation’s call to war.
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Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1
Ludwig Wittgenstein
University of Chicago Press, 1980
Wittgenstein finished part 1 of the Philosophical Investigations in the spring of 1945. From 1946 to 1949 he worked on the philosophy of psychology almost without interruption. The present two-volume work comprises many of his writings over this period. Some of the remarks contained here were culled for part 2 of the Investigations; others were set aside and appear in the collection known as Zettel. The great majority, however, although of excellent quality, have hitherto remained unpublished.

This bilingual edition of the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology presents the first English translation of an essential body of Wittegenstein's work. It elaborates Wittgenstein's views on psychological concepts such as expectation, sensation, knowing how to follow a rule, and knowledge of the sensations of other persons. It also shows strong emphasis on the "anthropological" aspect of Wittgenstein's thought. Philosophers, as well as anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists will welcome this important publication.
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Notebooks, 1914-1916
Ludwig Wittgenstein
University of Chicago Press, 1979
This considerably revised second edition of Wittgenstein's 1914-16 notebooks contains a new appendix with photographs of Wittgenstein's original work, a new preface by Elizabeth Anscombe, and a useful index by E.D. Klemke. Corrections have been made throughout the text, and notes have been added, making this the definitive edition of the notebooks. The writings intersperse Wittgenstein's technical logical notations with his thoughts on the meaning of life, happiness, and death.

"When the first edition of this collection of remarks appeared in 1961 we were provided with a glimpse of the workings of Wittgenstein's mind during the period when the seminal ideas of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus were being worked out. This second edition provided the occasion to be struck anew by the breadth, rigor, and above all the restlessness of that mind."—T. Michael McNulty, S. J., The Modern Schoolman
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Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939
Ludwig Wittgenstein
University of Chicago Press, 1989
For several terms at Cambridge in 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein lectured on the philosophical foundations of mathematics. A lecture class taught by Wittgenstein, however, hardly resembled a lecture.

He sat on a chair in the middle of the room, with some of the class sitting in chairs, some on the floor. He never used notes. He paused frequently, sometimes for several minutes, while he puzzled out a problem. He often asked his listeners questions and reacted to their replies. Many meetings were largely conversation.

These lectures were attended by, among others, D. A. T. Gasking, J. N. Findlay, Stephen Toulmin, Alan Turing, G. H. von Wright, R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies. Notes taken by these last four are the basis for the thirty-one lectures in this book.

The lectures covered such topics as the nature of mathematics, the distinctions between mathematical and everyday languages, the truth of mathematical propositions, consistency and contradiction in formal systems, the logicism of Frege and Russell, Platonism, identity, negation, and necessary truth. The mathematical examples used are nearly always elementary.
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The Mythology in Our Language
Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough
Ludwig Wittgenstein
HAU, 2015

In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” published posthumously in 1967. At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact—continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology’s theoretical terms, like mana, taboo, and potlatch, in order to help them explore the limits of human belief and imagination. Now the book receives its first translation by an anthropologist, in the hope that it can kick-start a new era of interdisciplinary fertilization.

Wittgenstein’s remarks on ritual, magic, religion, belief, ceremony, and Frazer’s own logical presuppositions are as lucid and thought-provoking now as they were in Wittgenstein’s day. Anthropologists find themselves asking many of the same questions as Wittgenstein—and in a reflection of that, this volume is fleshed out with a series of engagements with Wittgenstein’s ideas by some of the world’s leading anthropologists, including Veena Das, David Graeber, Wendy James, Heonik Kwon, Michael Lambek, Michael Puett, and Carlo Severi.

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