BiblioVault - Books by Robinson

I Fought a Good Fight

A History of the Lipan Apaches

Sherry Robinson

University of North Texas Press, 2013

In Bad Faith

The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain’s America

Forrest Robinson

Harvard University Press, 1986

Something is not right in the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The unease is less evident to Tom, the manipulator, than to the socially marginal Huck. The trouble is most dramatically revealed when Huck, whose “sivilized” Christian conscience is developing, faces the choice between betraying his black friend Jim—which he believes is his moral duty—and letting him escape, as his heart tells him to do.

“Bad faith” is Forrest Robinson's name for the dissonance between what we profess to believe, how we act, and how we interpret our own behavior. There is bad faith in the small hypocrisies of daily living, but Robinson has a much graver issue in mind—namely slavery, which persisted for nearly a century in a Christian republic founded on ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. Huck, living on the fringes of small-town society, recognizes Jim's humanity and understands the desperateness of his plight. Yet Huck is white, a member of the dominant class; he is at once influenced and bewildered by the contradictions of bad faith in the minds of his fully acculturated contemporaries.

Robinson stresses that “bad faith” is more than a theme with Mark Twain; his bleak view of man's social nature (however humorously expressed), his nostalgia, his ambivalence about the South, his complex relationship to his audience, can all be traced back to an awareness of the deceits at the core of his culture—and he is not himself immune. This deeply perceptive book will be of interest to students of American literature and history and to anyone concerned with moral issues.

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Inaccessible Access

Rethinking Disability Inclusion in Academic Knowledge Creation

Kelly Fagan Robinson

Rutgers University Press

Inaccessible Access ethnographically addresses barriers to inclusion within knowledge-making. It focuses on the social, environmental, communicative, and epistemological barriers that people with disabilities confront and embody throughout the course of their learning, living and in the specific context of their Higher Education Institutions and in research. It is presented by a neurodiverse, disabled, and non-cis cohort of authors, all of whom acknowledge a continuum of (in)access which is available to each contributor contingent on their inherent intersectionalities and alterities. The authors and editors of this book foreground the work that has yet to be done on recognising the value of non-normative ways of approaching, being in and knowing research and higher education, particularly in cases where disablity-centred epistemologies are side-lined in confrontation with institutional norms, even within existing discourses concerning equality and alterity.

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The Indus

Lost Civilizations

Andrew Robinson

Reaktion Books, 2015

The Indus civilization flourished for half a millennium from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, when it mysteriously declined and vanished from view. It remained invisible for almost four thousand years, until its ruins were discovered in the 1920s by British and Indian archaeologists. Today, after almost a century of excavation, it is regarded as the beginning of Indian civilization and possibly the origin of Hinduism. The Indus: Lost Civilizations is an accessible introduction to every significant aspect of an extraordinary and tantalizing “lost” civilization, which combined artistic excellence, technological sophistication, and economic vigor with social egalitarianism, political freedom, and religious moderation. The book also discusses the vital legacy of the Indus civilization in India and Pakistan today.

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Inquiry into the Picturesque

Sidney K. Robinson

University of Chicago Press, 1991

The aesthetic mode of the picturesque has undergone so many transformations since its initial discussion in eighteenth-century England that it is hard to say just what it is. In these probing essays, Sidney K. Robinson re-examines the picturesque in its late eighteenth-century phase.

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An Intellectual History of Psychology

Daniel N. Robinson

University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

     An Intellectual History of Psychology, already a classic in its field, is now available in a concise new third edition. It presents psychological ideas as part of a greater web of thinking throughout history about the essentials of human nature, interwoven with ideas from philosophy, science, religion, art, literature, and politics.
     Daniel N. Robinson demonstrates that from the dawn of rigorous and self-critical inquiry in ancient Greece, reflections about human nature have been inextricably linked to the cultures from which they arose, and each definable historical age has added its own character and tone to this long tradition. An Intellectual History of Psychology not only explores the most significant ideas about human nature from ancient to modern times, but also examines the broader social and scientific contexts in which these concepts were articulated and defended. Robinson treats each epoch, whether ancient Greece or Renaissance Florence or Enlightenment France, in its own terms, revealing the problems that dominated the age and engaged the energies of leading thinkers.
     Robinson also explores the abiding tension between humanistic and scientific perspectives, assessing the most convincing positions on each side of the debate. Invaluable as a text for students and as a stimulating and insightful overview for scholars and practicing psychologists, this volume can be read either as a history of psychology in both its philosophical and aspiring scientific periods or as a concise history of Western philosophy’s concepts of human nature.

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Islam

A Concise Introduction

Neal Robinson

Georgetown University Press, 1999

This book provides a concise yet panoramic overview of Islam, unlike most introductory books, which focus mainly on the development of Islamic institutions in the classical period.

To place Islam in perspective, Neal Robinson discusses the problems raised by Western perceptions of Islam and provides a brief account of Islamic history down to the present. He then explains major topics in Islamic worship to help readers understand it as a living faith. Appendices guide the novice through the structure of Arabic names, transliteration, and the Islamic calendar and festivals.

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The Islamic World

Edited by William H. McNeill and Marilyn Robinson Waldman

University of Chicago Press, 1984

The Islamic World is a collection of important and representative documents from all periods of Islamic history. From the formative years in Arabia to the confrontations with and responses to modernity, these translations indicate the continuity and development of the youngest of the world's greatest civilizations. Included are historical, theological, philosophical, and political writings, as well as poetry and narratives, from Muslim writers in the Arab lands, Turkey, Persia, and other parts of the Islamic world. The editors have provided informative introductions to each historical period and to the individual texts, making this an enlightening and intriguing first look at Islamic civilization and tradition.

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