front cover of Before THE BIG BONANZA
Before THE BIG BONANZA
Dan De Quille's Early Comstock Accounts
Edited by Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence I. Berkove
University of Missouri Press, 2015
The discovery and mining of the Comstock Lode in Nevada forever changed the mining culture of the American West. Using the pen name Dan De Quille, in 1876 William Wright published The Big Bonanza, the best-known contemporary account of the Comstock Lode mines. Previously, however, in nearly fifty newspaper accounts from 1860 to 1863, De Quille had documented the development of the early Comstock with a frankness, abundance of detail, sense of immediacy, and excitement largely absent from his book. Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence I. Berkove have gathered those accounts together in Before The Big Bonanza.



De Quille describes the amazing transformation of the Comstock in less than four years from miscellaneous tent camps and primitive mining sites to an incredible complex of underground shafts and tunnels beneath a group of wealth-producing cities, with modern buildings, state-of-the-art mills, orderly streets, and traffic jams. He captures the vitality of the inhabitants' resolution and resourcefulness as they survive destructive storms and being cut off from supplies and entertainment, and he chronicles the events that kept Nevada and California in the Union. While reporting the prevailing violence of brawling and dueling and anti-Indian prejudice, De Quille at the same time conveys his thoughtful observations on the significance to democracy and civilization of the existence of such license.



This trove of columns, collected from a variety of newspapers, is history in the making and additionally casts new light on the life and rapidly developing art of De Quille, the biographer of the Comstock and one of the most versatile and accomplished authors of the Old West.
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Before the Closet
Same-Sex Love from "Beowulf" to "Angels in America"
Allen J. Frantzen
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Allen J. Frantzen challenges the long accepted view that the early Middle Ages tolerated and even fostered same-sex relations and that intolerance of homosexuality developed only late in the medieval period. Frantzen shows that in early medieval Europe, the Church did not tolerate same-sex acts, in fact it was an age before people recognized the existence—or the possibility—of the "closet."

With its ambitious scope and elegant style, Before the Closet sets same-sex relations in Anglo-Saxon sources in relation to the sexual themes of contemporary opera, dance, and theatre. Frantzen offers a comprehensive analysis of sources from the seventh to the twelfth century and traces Anglo-Saxon same-sex behavior through the age of Chaucer and into the Renaissance.

"Frantzen's marvelous book . . . opens up a world most readers will never have even known was there. It's a difficult topic, but Frantzen's comprehensive, readable and even wryly funny treatment makes this an unexpected pleasure."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
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Before the Convention
Strategies and Choices in Presidential Nomination Campaigns
John H. Aldrich
University of Chicago Press, 1980

Campaigns to win the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations are longer, more complex, and more confusing to the observer than the general election itself. The maze of delegate-selection procedures includes state primaries and caucuses as well as the traditional "smoke-filled room." Complicated federal election laws govern campaign financing. Sometimes many candidates enter and drop out of the race, while sometimes a stable two-way contest occurs: the 1976 nomination campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford exemplified each extreme. Is it possible to propose general principles to explain the apparent chaos of our presidential nomination system? Can those principles account for two such starkly different campaigns as occurred in 1976? In Before the Convention, political scientist John H. Aldrich presents a systematic analysis of presidential nomination politics, based on application of rational-choice models to candidate behavior. Aldrich views the candidates as decision makers with limited resources in a highly competitive environment. From this perspective, he seeks to determine why and how candidates choose to run, why some succeed and others fail, and what consequences the nomination process has for the general election and, later, for the President in office.

Aldrich begins with a brief history of the presidential selection process, focusing on the continuing shift of power from political elites to the mass electorate. He then turns to a detailed analysis of the 1976 nomination campaigns. Using data from a variety of sources, Aldrich demonstrates that the very different patterns in these races both conform to the rational-choice model. The analysis includes consideration of numerous questions of strategy. Is there a "momentum" to campaigns? How does a candidate identify and exploit this intangible quality? How do candidates decide where to contend and where not to contend? What is the nature of policy competition among candidates? When does a candidate prefer a "fuzzy" position to a clearly stated one? Other topics include reforms in campaign financing and the expanded and changed role of news coverage.

Before the Convention fills a significant gap in the literature on presidential politics, and therefore should be of particular importance to specialists in this area. It will be ofinterest also to everyone who is concerned with understanding the "rules of the game" for a complicated but vitally important exercise of American democracy.

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Before the Curse
The Chicago Cubs' Glory Years, 1870-1945
Edited by Randy Roberts and Carson Cunningham
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Before the Curse: The Chicago Cubs' Glory Years, 1870–1945 brings to life the early history of the much beloved and often heartbreaking Chicago Cubs. Originally called the Chicago White Stockings, the team immediately established itself as a powerhouse, winning the newly formed National Base Ball League's inaugural pennant in 1876, repeating the feat in 1880 and 1881, and commanding the league in the decades to come. The legendary days of the Cubs are recaptured here in more than two dozen vintage newspaper accounts and historical essays on the teams and the fans who loved them. The great games, pennant races, and series are all here, including the 1906 World Series between the Cubs and Chicago White Sox. Of course, Before the Curse remembers the hall-of-fame players--Grover Cleveland Alexander, Gabby Hartnett, Roger Hornsby, Dizzy Dean--who delighted Cubs fans with their play on the field and their antics elsewhere.
 
Through stimulating introductions to each article, Randy Roberts and Carson Cunningham demonstrate how changes in ownership affected the success of the team, who the teams' major players were both on and off the field, and how regular fans, owners, players, journalists, and Chicagoans of the past talked and wrote about baseball.
[more]

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Before the Dissertation
A Textual Mentor for Doctoral Students at Early Stages of a Research Project
Christine Pearson Casanave
University of Michigan Press, 2014

“This very readable book is what every graduate student needs as they start a program. I wish my own MA and PhD students, during my 40 years of supervising, could have been demystified by having Casanave's ‘textual mentor' as a companion."

                                                                                        --Merrill Swain, Professor Emerita, OISE, University of Toronto

 “Before the Dissertation is an insightful, relevant, and accessible resource for doctoral students at any stage. Full of reflections and advice not found in other books, it serves as an indispensable guide for students and their supervisors. And the dispelling of myths is a superb idea!”

                                                                                                --Robert Kohls, PhD candidate, University of Toronto

 

Before the Dissertation concerns issues to consider before students start writing, indeed before they commit to a major high-stakes dissertation project, whether qualitative or quantitative or something in between. It is especially relevant for students who wish to do projects that involve a lengthy research period (which can add to stress), and that also involve reading, data collection, and writing in more than one language. From the earliest stages of doctoral work, even before the proposal stage, and during intermediate stages of preparation for a project as well, there are things to think about and discuss with friends, family, and advisers such as: Why do you want to pursue a doctoral degree? Do you fully understand what you are getting into? How will you manage to develop an appropriate topic? What will your role be in your project and what languages will you use with multilingual participants? How might you engage with reading, people, and personal writing at early stages in ways that will contribute to your project's development? How much attention should you pay to quality-of-life issues?

Before the Dissertation speaks to an audience in the social sciences, but in particular to doctoral students who have experience with and interest in international, multilingual, as well as native English speaking students and settings and who wish to investigate topics in (second) language and multicultural-transcultural education. Athough appropriate for use in English-dominant doctoral programs throughout the world, the book will relate more closely to students in the North American educational system than to ones, for example, in the British system. The main audience for this book is thus doctoral students who are first or second/additional users of English, who are interested in pursuing topics in one of the social sciences, including education and multilingual inquiry, and who may just be finishing course work in an English-dominant university and are wondering what might happen next.

                                                                                               

[more]

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Before the Echo
Essays on Nature
By Pete Dunne
University of Texas Press, 1995

"The natural world is a lot like a game of musical chairs," observes Pete Dunne. "Everywhere you turn, everywhere you go, there are places where living things sit down, niches that support their specific needs. But just as in musical chairs, there aren't enough places to go around. Our species keeps removing them—forcing other creatures to leave the game."

In these twenty-nine essays, one of America's top nature writers trains his sights on the beauties and the vulnerabilities of the natural world. Writing to infuse others with a sense of the richness and diversity that nature holds, Pete Dunne ranges over topics from the wonder of the year's first snowfall to the lost art of stargazing to the mysterious forces that impel people to hunt—and not to hunt. Running like a thread through all the essays is Dunne's desire to preserve all that is "natural" in nature, to stop our unthinking destruction of wild places and wild creatures before we humans find ourselves with "the last chair, in an empty room" on an impoverished earth.

[more]

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Before the Flood
The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil
Jacob Blanc
Duke University Press, 2019
In Before the Flood Jacob Blanc traces the protest movements of rural Brazilians living in the shadow of the Itaipu dam—the largest producer of hydroelectric power in the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, local communities facing displacement took a stand against the military officials overseeing the dam's construction, and in the context of an emerging national fight for democracy, they elevated their struggle for land into a referendum on the dictatorship itself. Unlike the broader campaign against military rule, however, the conflict at Itaipu was premised on issues that long predated the official start of dictatorship: access to land, the defense of rural and indigenous livelihoods, and political rights in the countryside. In their efforts against Itaipu and through conflicts among themselves, title-owning farmers, landless peasants, and the Avá-Guarani Indians articulated a rural-based vision for democracy. Through interviews and archival research—including declassified military documents and the first-ever access to the Itaipu Binational Corporation—Before the Flood challenges the primacy of urban-focused narratives and unearths the rural experiences of dictatorship and democracy in Brazil.
[more]

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Before the Grand Opening
Measuring Washington State’s Marijuana Market in the Last Year Before Legalized Commercial Sales
Beau Kilmer
RAND Corporation, 2013
The 2012 passage of Initiative 502 in Washington state removed the prohibition on the production, distribution, and possession of marijuana for nonmedical purposes and required the state to regulate and tax a new marijuana industry. This report uses data from multiple sources to estimate the total weight of marijuana consumed in the state in 2013 to provide decisionmakers with baseline information about the size of the state’s market.
[more]

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Before the Ivy
The Cubs' Golden Age in Pre-Wrigley Chicago
Laurent Pernot
University of Illinois Press, 2015
All Cub fans know from heartbreak and curse-toting goats. Fewer know that, prior to moving to the north side in 1916, the team fielded powerhouse nines that regularly claimed the pennant. Before the Ivy offers a grandstand seat to a golden age:

BEHOLD the 1871 team as it plays for the title in nine different borrowed uniforms after losing everything in the Great Chicago Fire

ATTEND West Side Grounds at Polk and Wolcott with its barbershop quartet

MARVEL as superstar Cap Anson hits .399, makes extra cash running a ballpark ice rink, and strikes out as an elected official

WONDER at experiments with square bats and corked balls, the scandal of Sunday games and pre-game booze-ups, the brazen spitters and park dimensions changed to foil Ty Cobb

RAZZ Charles Comiskey as he adopts a Cubs hand-me-down moniker for his team's name

THRILL to the poetic double-play combo of Tinker, Evers, and Chance even as they throw tantrums at umpires and punches at each other

CHEER as Merkle's Boner and the Cubs' ensuing theatrics send the team to the 1908 World Series

Rich with Hall of Fame personalities and oddball stories, Before the Ivy opens a door to Chicago's own field of dreams and serves as every Cub fan's guide to a time when thoughts of "next year" filled rival teams with dread.

[more]

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Before the Law
Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame
Cary Wolfe
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Animal studies and biopolitics are two of the most dynamic areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, but until now, they have had little to say to each other. Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.
 
Wolfe argues that the human­­­-animal distinction must be supplemented with the central distinction of biopolitics: the difference between those animals that are members of a community and those that are deemed killable but not murderable. From this understanding, we can begin to make sense of the fact that this distinction prevails within both the human and animal domains and address such difficult issues as why we afford some animals unprecedented levels of care and recognition while subjecting others to unparalleled forms of brutality and exploitation. Engaging with many major figures in biopolitical thought—from Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault to Agamben, Esposito, and Derrida—Wolfe explores how biopolitics can help us understand both the ethical and political dimensions of the current questions surrounding the rights of animals.
[more]

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Before the Manifesto
The Life Writings of Mary Lois Walker Morris
Melissa Lambert Milewski
Utah State University Press, 2007
Mary Lois Walker Morris was a Mormon woman who challenged both American ideas about marriage and the U.S. legal system. Before the Manifesto provides a glimpse into her world as the polygamous wife of a prominent Salt Lake City businessman, during a time of great transition in Utah. This account of her life as a convert, milliner, active community member, mother, and wife begins in England, where her family joined the Mormon church, details her journey across the plains, and describes life in Utah in the 1880s. Her experiences were unusual as, following her first husband's deathbed request, she married his brother, as a plural wife, in the Old Testament tradition of levirate marriage.

Mary Morris's memoir frames her 1879 to 1887 diary with both reflections on earlier years and passages that parallel entries in the day book, giving readers a better understanding of how she retrospectively saw her life. The thoroughly annotated diary offers the daily experience of a woman who kept a largely self-sufficient household, had a wide social network, ran her own business, wrote poetry, and was intellectually curious. The years of "the Raid" (federal prosecution of polygamists) led Mary and Elias Morris to hide their marriage on "the underground," and her to perjury in court during Elias's trial for unlawful cohabitation. The book ends with Mary Lois's arrival at the Salt Lake Depot after three years in exile in Mexico with a polygamist colony.
[more]

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Before the Nation
Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan
Susan L. Burns
Duke University Press, 2003
Exploring the emergence and evolution of theories of nationhood that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan, Susan L. Burns provides a close examination of the late-eighteenth-century intellectual movement kokugaku, which means "the study of our country.” Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku that focused on intellectuals whose work has been valorized by modern scholars, Burns seeks to recover the multiple ways "Japan" as social and cultural identity began to be imagined before modernity.

Central to Burns's analysis is Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden, arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan's early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers—Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe—who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate—involving history, language, and subjectivity—with repercussions extending well into the modern era.

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Before the Revolution
America's Ancient Pasts
Daniel K. Richter
Harvard University Press, 2011

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation’s pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent—that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present.

Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoples—Indians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, English—as they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico.

By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter’s epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.

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Before the Storm
A Year in the Pribilof Islands, 1941-1942
Fredericka Martin
University of Alaska Press, 2010

From June of 1941 through the following summer, Fredericka Martin lived with her husband, Dr. Samuel Berenberg, on remote St. Paul Island in Alaska. During that time, Martin delved into the complex history of the Unangan people, and Before the Storm draws from her personal accounts of that year and her research to present a fascinating portrait of a time and a people facing radical change. A government-ordered evacuation of all Aleuts from the island in the face of World War II, which Martin recounts in her journal, proved but the first step in a long struggle by native peoples to gain independence, and, as editor Raymond L. Hudson explains, Martin came to play a significant role in the effort.

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Before the Volcano Erupted
The Ancient Cerén Village in Central America
Edited by Payson Sheets
University of Texas Press, 2002

On an August evening around AD 600, residents of the Cerén village in the Zapotitán Valley of what is now El Salvador were sitting down to their nightly meal when ground tremors and loud steam emissions warned of an impending volcanic eruption. The villagers fled, leaving their town to be buried under five meters of volcanic ash and forgotten until a bulldozer uncovered evidence of the extraordinarily preserved town in 1976. The most intact Precolumbian village in Latin America, Cerén has been called the "Pompeii of the New World."

This book presents complete and detailed reports of the excavations carried out at Cerén since 1978 by a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, ethnographers, volcanologists, geophysicists, botanists, conservators, and others. The book is divided into sections that discuss the physical environment and resources, household structures and economy, special buildings and their uses, artifact analysis, and topical and theoretical issues.

As the authors present and analyze Cerén's houses and their goods, workshops, civic and religious buildings, kitchen gardens, planted fields, and garbage dumps, a new and much clearer picture of how commoners lived during the Maya Classic Period emerges. These findings constitute landmark contributions to the anthropology and archaeology of Central America.

[more]

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Before Their Time
Mary Stimming
Temple University Press, 1998
Before Their Time is the first work  to present adult children survivors' (defined as eighteen or above at the time of the parent's death) accounts of their loss, grief, and resolution following a parent's suicide. In once section, the book offers the perspectives of sons and daughters on the deaths of mothers; in another, the perspectives of sons and daughters on the  deaths of fathers. In a third section, siblings reflect on the shared loss of their mother.

Each of these survivors faces the  common difficulties associated with losing a loved one by suicide. They also experience difficulties specific to their status as both adult and child. Topics such as the impact of the parent's suicide on adult children's personal and  professional choices, marriages and parenting, sibling and surviving parent relationships are explored with sensitivity and insight. Various coping skills, including humor, are described.

The writers describe feelings of regret and responsibility related to their parent's suicide. They express concern about other family members' vulnerability to suicide. They speak openly about the fears and stresses they face and how they cope with them.

The authors ranged in age from nineteen to thirty-six at the time of the parent's death. Between one and  twenty-five years have passed since that tragedy.

In addition to the first-person narratives, the book includes a resource section with a national listing of  suicide survivor support groups; an overview of existing research on survivors of suicide by John L. McIntosh, past president of the American Association of Suicidology; and  an essay on elderly suicide by David C. Clark, secretary-general, International Association for  Suicide, and  editor-in-chief of Crisis. The book is introduced with a Foreword by Rev. Charles Rubey, founder and director of Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide.
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Before They Could Vote
American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919
Edited by Sidonie A. Smith and Julia Watson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition—some well known, some forgotten over generations—who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections—from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches—span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly. Some rose to positions of prominence as writers, activists, and artists; some sought education or wrote to support themselves and their families; some transgressed social norms in search of new possibilities. Each woman's story is strikingly individual, yet the brief narratives in this anthology collectively chart bold new visions of women's agency.

"This rich new anthology sets in motion an inter-textual conversation of remarkable vitality that will change the ways we understand gender, class, ethnicity, culture, and nation in nineteenth-century America."—Susanna Egan, author of Mirror-Talk

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Before They Were Cardinals
Major League Baseball in Nineteenth-Century St. Louis
Jon David Cash
University of Missouri Press, 2002

Mark McGwire, Ozzie Smith, Lou Brock. These famous Cardinals are known by baseball fans around the world. But who and what were the predecessors of these modern-day players and their team? In Before They Were Cardinals, Jon David Cash examines the infancy of major-league baseball in St. Louis during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. His in-depth analysis begins with an exploration of the factors that motivated civic leaders to form the city's first major-league ball club. Cash delves into the economic trade rivalry between Chicago and St. Louis and examines how St. Louis's attempt to compete with Chicago led to the formation of the St. Louis Brown Stockings in 1875. He then explains why, three years later, despite its initial success, St. Louis baseball quickly vanished from the big-league map.

St. Louis baseball was revived with the arrival of German immigrant saloon owner Chris Von der Ahe. Cash explains how Von der Ahe, originally only interested in concession rights, purchased a controlling interest in the Brown Stockings. His riveting account follows the team after Von der Ahe's purchase, from the formation of the American Association, to its merger in 1891 with the rival National League. He chronicles Von der Ahe's monetary downturn, and the club's decline as well, following the merger.

Before They Were Cardinals provides vivid portraits of the ball players and the participants involved in the baseball war between the National League and the American Association. Cash points out significant differences, such as Sunday games and beer sales, between the two Leagues. In addition, excerpts taken from Chicago and St. Louis newspapers make the on-field contests and off-field rivalries come alive. Cash concludes this lively historical narrative with an appendix that traces the issue of race in baseball during this period.

The excesses of modern-day baseball—players jumping contracts or holding out for more money, gambling on games, and drinking to excess; owners stealing players and breaking agreements—were all present in the nineteenth-century sport. Players were seen then, as they are now, as an embodiment of their community. This timely treatment of a fascinating period in St. Louis baseball history will appeal to both baseball aficionados and those who want to understand the history of baseball itself.

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Before Truth
Lonergan, Aquinas, and the Problem of Wisdom
Jeremy Wilkins
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
It’s frequently said that we live in a “post-truth” age. That obviously can’t be true, but it does name a real problem on our hands. Getting things right is hard, especially if they’re complicated. It takes preparation, diligence, and honesty. Wisdom, according to Thomas Aquinas, is the quality of right judgment. This book is about the problem of becoming wise, the problem “before truth.” It is about that problem particularly as it comes up for religious, philosophical, and theological truth claims. Before Truth: Lonergan, Aquinas, and the Problem of Wisdom proposes that Bernard Lonergan’s approach to these problems can help us become wise. One of the special problems facing Christian believers today is our awareness of how much our tradition has developed. This development has occurred along a path shot through with contingencies. Theologians have to be able to articulate how and why doctrines, institutions, and practices that have developed—and are still developing—should nevertheless be worthy of our assent and devotion.
[more]

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Before Virtue
Jonathan J. Sanford
Catholic University of America Press, 2015
Jonathan Sanford finds that despite the common origins of contemporary virtue ethics in Anscombe, the literature varies widely not just in its scope but in its basic commitments. What exactly is contemporary virtue ethics? In Before Virtue, Sanford develops strategies for describing contemporary virtue ethics accurately. He then assesses contemporary virtue approaches by the Anscombean dual standard which inspired them: the degree to which they avoid the pitfalls of modern moral philosophy and the extent to which they exemplify a successful recovery of an Aristotelian approach to ethics.
[more]

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Before Voltaire
The French Origins of “Newtonian” Mechanics, 1680-1715
J.B. Shank
University of Chicago Press, 2017
We have grown accustomed to the idea that scientific theories are embedded in their place and time. But in the case of the development of mathematical physics in eighteenth-century France, the relationship was extremely close. In Before Voltaire, J.B. Shank shows that although the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687 exerted strong influence, the development of calculus-based physics is better understood as an outcome that grew from French culture in general.
 
Before Voltaire explores how Newton’s ideas made their way not just through the realm of French science, but into the larger world of society and culture of which Principia was an intertwined part. Shank also details a history of the beginnings of calculus-based mathematical physics that integrates it into the larger intellectual currents in France at the time, including the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, the emergence of wider audiences for science, and the role of the newly reorganized Royal Academy of Sciences. The resulting book offers an unprecedented cultural history of one the most important and influential elements of Enlightenment science.
 
[more]

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Before Writing, Vol. I
From Counting to Cuneiform
By Denise Schmandt-Besserat
University of Texas Press, 1992

A fascinating book on the origins of writing.

Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.

[more]

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Before Writing, Vol. II
A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens
By Denise Schmandt-Besserat
University of Texas Press, 1992

Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.

[more]

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The Beforeland
A Novel
Corinna Vallianatos
Acre Books, 2020
In The Beforeland, a boy’s desperate act of rebellion against his grandmother reverberates outward, causing rifts and reckonings in the lives of others: a man fleeing his own troubled family who becomes the grandson’s unwitting accomplice; a poet struggling with the limitations of language and his wife’s distance; the proprietor of a dying motel; and the grandmother herself, who finds love for the first time as she recuperates from her injury. Set in the Mojave Desert and the suburbs of Southern California, this revelatory novel moves swiftly among characters who are caught between the deprivations of the past and the mysteries of the future. With unflinching precision, Vallianatos unearths the vulnerability and volatility at our cores.
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Befriending
The American Samaritans
Monica Dickens
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996
This book relates the founding in America, and evaluates the effectiveness of, a branch of the worldwide organization of volunteers known as the Samaritans, committed to the prevention of suicide through the simple means of “listening therapy.” Great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, Monica Dickens was best known in England as a novelist; in America, as the founder of the U.S. Samaritans. Today Samaritans are in every large city of the country. Volunteers work twenty-four hours a day, answering telephones or meeting troubled people, to try to give them, in nonjudgmental ways, the help they need to get their lives back in order.
[more]

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The Beggar and the Professor
A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
University of Chicago Press, 1997
From a wealth of vivid autobiographical writings, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons. With masterful erudition, Le Roy Ladurie deepens and expands the historical contexts of these accounts and, in the process, brings to life the customs, perceptions, and character of an age poised at the threshold of modernity.

"Le Roy Ladurie paints a remarkably contemporary picture of life in the sixteenth century. . . . It's a good story, told with a deft narrative touch."—Michael S. Kimmel, The Nation

"Le Roy Ladurie is a master of the representative detail and uses the Platters' lives as a means to see a whole century 'through a glass, darkly'."—The Independent

"Le Roy Ladurie has not only thoroughly sketched out the Platters' particular brand of gusto, he has also made it seem a defining characteristic of the sixteenth century."—The New Republic

"All [of] the drama and pathos of a Disney film."—Emily Eakin, Lingua Franca
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Beggars and Thieves
Lives of Urban Street Criminals
Mark S. Fleisher
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

As the incidence of violent crime rises in the United States, so does the public demand for a solution. But what will work?
    Mark S. Fleisher has spent years among inmates in jails and prisons and on the streets with thieves, gang members, addicts, and life-long criminals in Seattle and other cities across the country. In Beggars and Thieves, he writes about how and why they become and remain offenders, and about the actual role of jails and prisons in efforts to deter crime and rehabilitate criminals. Fleisher shows, with wrenching firsthand accounts, that parents who are addicts, abusers, and criminals beget irreversibly damaged children who become addicts, abusers, and criminals. Further, Fleisher contends that many well-intentioned educational and vocational training programs are wasted because they are offered too late to help. And, he provides sobering evidence that many youthful and adult offenders find themselves better off in prison—with work to do, medical care, a clean place to sleep, regular meals, and stable social ties—than they are in America’s cities.
    Fleisher calls for anti-crime policies that are bold, practical, and absolutely imperative. He prescribes life terms for violent offenders, but in prisons structured as work communities, where privileges are earned through work in expanded, productive industries that reduce the financial burden of incarceration on the public. But most important, he argues that the only way to prevent street crime, cut prison growth, and reduce the waste of money and human lives is to permanently remove brutalized children from criminal, addicted, and violent parents.

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Beggar’s Bedlam
Nabarun Bhattacharya
Seagull Books, 2024
A hilarious and absurdist take on the political landscape of West Bengal, India.

Beggar’s Bedlam is a surreal novel that unleashes the chaos of the carnival on the familiar. Part literary descendent of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and part a reconstruction of lost Bengali history, Nabarun Bhattacharya’s masterpiece is a jubilant, fizzing wire of subaltern anarchy and insurrection.
 
Marshall Bhodi Sarkar and his lieutenant Sarkhel surreptitiously dig on the banks of the Ganges River looking for crude oil reserves. Instead, they unearth curved daggers, rusty broadswords, and a Portuguese cannon. Bhodi is an occasional military man and the lead sorcerer of the secret black-magic sect named Choktar. He joins forces with the flying Flaperoos—men with a predilection for alcohol and petty vandalism—to declare outright war against the Marxist–Leninist West Bengal government. In a bloodless revolution that is fascinating in its utter implausibility, a motley crew of yet more implausible characters come together in a magic-realist fictional remapping of Calcutta.
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Begging for It
Alex Dimitrov
Four Way Books, 2013
In his debut collection of poems, Begging for It, Alex Dimitrov leads us through the streets, bridges, and bedrooms of New York City, sometimes as far away as Buenos Aires and Iceland, and as close as our own darkest corners. A Bulgarian immigrant, Dimitrov writes as both observer of and fervent participant in this “American Youth,” as his speakers navigate both the physical and emotional landscapes of desire, intimacy, and longing—whether for a friend, a lover, or a self, “Saint or stranger, I still recklessly seek you.”
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Begin Again
A Biography of John Cage
Kenneth Silverman
Northwestern University Press, 2012

A man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents—musician, inventor, composer, poet, and even amateur mycologist—John Cage became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. Silverman begins with Cage’s childhood in interwar Los Angeles and his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where immersion in the burgeoning new musical and artistic movements triggered an explosion of his creativity. Cage continued his studies in the United States with the seminal modern composer Arnold Schoenberg, and he soon began the experiments with sound and percussion instruments that would develop into his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. Cage’s unorthodox methods still influence artists in a wide range of genres and media. Silverman concurrently follows Cage’s rich personal life, from his early marriage to his lifelong personal and professional partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as his friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers. 
 

Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the enormous archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs, facsimiles of musical scores, and Web links to illustrative sections of his compositions, Silverman gives us a biography of major significance: a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century.

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Begin Here
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
Jacques Barzun
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In this powerful, eloquent, and timely book, Jacques Barzun offers guidance for resolving the crisis in America's schools and colleges. Drawing on a lifetime of distinguished teaching, he issues a clear call to action for improving what goes on in America's classrooms. The result is an extraordinarily fresh, sensible, and practical program for better schools.

"It is difficult to imagine a more pungent, perceptive or eloquent commentary on contemporary American education than this collection of 15 pieces by Jacques Barzun."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"Mr. Barzun's style is elegant, distinctive, philosophically consistent and much better-humored than that of many contemporary invective-hurlers."—David Alexander, New York Times Book Review
[more]

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Beginners’ Dictionary of Chinese-Japanese Characters
With Common Abbreviation, Variants and Numerous Compounds
Arthur Rose-Innes
Harvard University Press

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Beginner's Luck
Dispatches from the Klamath Mountains
Malcolm Terence
Oregon State University Press, 2018

In the late 1960s, Malcolm Terence left his job as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times to look for adventure and may have found more than he bargained for. The era had triggered unprecedented social and political changes in America, tectonic shifts that challenged war and the social order that oppressed people along lines of class, gender, and race. One branch was a back-to-the-land movement, and Terence, who had just traveled for a year managing a rock band, strayed into Black Bear Ranch, a commune just starting in a remote corner of the Klamath Mountains near the California-Oregon border.

Black Bear Ranch still exists, but many of its early residents eventually returned to urban civilization. A few, Terence among them, stayed on in neighboring river towns. Some tried logging, others gold mining, and some tried growing marijuana, all with mixed success. The local mining and timber communities had a checkered opinion of their new hippie neighbors, as did the Native tribes, but it was the kind of place where people helped each other out, even if they didn’t always agree.

When wildfires grew large, Terence and other veterans of the commune joined the fire crews run by the US Forest Service. In between, the Black Bear expats built homesteads, planted gardens, delivered babies, and raised their children. They gradually overcame the skepticism of the locals and joined them in political battles against the use of herbicides in the forest and the Forest Service’s campaign to close all the mining claims. As in the best of organizing efforts, the organizers learned as much as they led.

Beginner’s Luck will appeal to anyone who experienced life on a commune in the 1960s–1970s or who wants to learn about this chapter in modern American history. Terence offers insight into environmental activism and the long history of conflict between resource exploitation and Native American rights without lecturing or pontificating. With wit, humor, and humility, his anecdotal essays chronicle a time and place where disparate people came together to form an unlikely community.

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Beginning at the End
Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry
Robert Stilling
Harvard University Press, 2018

During the struggle for decolonization, Frantz Fanon argued that artists who mimicked European aestheticism were “beginning at the end,” skipping the inventive phase of youth for a decadence thought more typical of Europe’s declining empires. Robert Stilling takes up Fanon’s assertion to argue that decadence became a key idea in postcolonial thought, describing both the failures of revolutionary nationalism and the assertion of new cosmopolitan ideas about poetry and art.

In Stilling’s account, anglophone postcolonial artists have reshaped modernist forms associated with the idea of art for art’s sake and often condemned as decadent. By reading decadent works by J. K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde alongside Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Mahon, Yinka Shonibare, Wole Soyinka, and Bernardine Evaristo, Stilling shows how postcolonial artists reimagined the politics of aestheticism in the service of anticolonial critique. He also shows how fin de siècle figures such as Wilde questioned the imperial ideologies of their own era.

Like their European counterparts, postcolonial artists have had to negotiate between the imaginative demands of art and the pressure to conform to a revolutionary politics seemingly inseparable from realism. Beginning at the End argues that both groups—European decadents and postcolonial artists—maintained commitments to artifice while fostering oppositional politics. It asks that we recognize what aestheticism has contributed to politically engaged postcolonial literature. At the same time, Stilling breaks down the boundaries around decadent literature, taking it outside of Europe and emphasizing the global reach of its imaginative transgressions.

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Beginning Hindi
A Complete Course
Joshua H. Pien and Fauzia Farooqui
Georgetown University Press, 2013

eTextbooks are now available through VitalSource.com!

Beginning Hindi is a complete first-year language textbook designed to help learners acquire the language by actively using it in realistic situations. The book and its accompanying audio files–available on the Press website–contain all that is needed to complete one full year of study, including clear explanations of language structures; useful, fun, and engaging activities; and an organizational format that makes it easy to chart student progress. Beginning Hindi parallels the authors' textbook Beginning Urdu and can be used side-by-side with it in classrooms that teach both languages in the same course. This is a fun, engaging, and well-tested approach to learning Hindi.

FEATURES Develops all four skills—listening, speaking, reading, writing—through a wide range of tasks and activities, including role-plays, games, and short conversations. Alongside Beginning Urdu, can support parallel instruction of both Hindi and Urdu in a single classroom. Includes 41 chapters in eight units, organized around functional themes such as home and family, everyday life, the marketplace, personal responsibilities, and travel. Can be used as a first-year, class-based textbook or a tool for independent study. Provides a review for each unit that includes review activities, tips for increasing fluency, and sets of questions to help personalize learning. Introduces grammar in a straightforward and practical way that is integrated with practical uses. Includes an English-Hindi and Hindi-English glossary Contains an appendix of advanced grammar. Includes common idiomatic expressions and proverbs in each unit. A list of Bollywood film songs to go with each unit is also included.

[more]

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The Beginning of History
Value Struggles and Global Capital
Massimo De Angelis
Pluto Press, 2007
Francis Fukuyama may declare the "end of history," and neoliberal capital embraces this belief. However, the diverse struggles for commons and dignity around the planet reveal a different reality: that of the beginning of history. The clash between these two perspectives is the subject matter of this book. This book analyzes the frontline of this struggle. On one side, a social force called capital pursues endless growth and monetary value. On the other side, other social forces strive to rearrange the web of life on their own terms. This book engages with alternative modes of coproduction recently posed by the alter-globalization movement, and it examines what these movements are up against. This passionate account explores groundbreaking new critical political economic theory and its role in bringing about radical social change. This book is a must for all political activists and students of political theory.
[more]

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The Beginning of Wisdom
Reading Genesis
Leon R. Kass
University of Chicago Press, 2006
As ardent debates over creationism fill the front pages of newspapers, Genesis has never been more timely. And as Leon R. Kass shows in The Beginning of Wisdom, it’s also timeless.

Examining Genesis in a philosophical light, Kass presents it not as a story of what happened long ago, but as the enduring story of humanity itself. He asserts that the first half of Genesis contains insights about human nature that “rival anything produced by the great philosophers.” Kass here reads these first stories—from Adam and Eve to the tower of Babel—as a mirror for self-discovery that reveals truths about human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, pride, shame, anger, and death. Taking a step further in the second half of his book, Kass explores the struggles in Genesis to launch a new way of life that addresses mankind’s morally ambiguous nature by promoting righteousness and holiness.

Even readers who don’t agree with Kass’s interpretations will find The Beginning of Wisdom acompelling book—a masterful philosophical take on one of the world’s seminal religious texts.

“Extraordinary. . . . Its analyses and hypotheses will leave no reader’s understanding of Genesis unchanged.” —New York Times

“A learned and fluent, delightfully overstuffed stroll through the Gates of Eden. . . . Mix Harold Bloom with Stephen Jay Gould and you’ll get something like Kass. A wonderfully intelligent reading of Genesis.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
 
“Throughout his book, Kass uses fruitful, fascinating techniques for getting at the heart of Genesis. . . . Innumerable times [he] makes a reader sit back and rethink what has previously been tediously familiar or baffling.”—Washington Post
 
“It is important to state that this is a book not merely rich, but prodigiously rich with insight. Kass is a marvelous reader, sensitive and careful. His interpretations surprise again and again with their cogency and poignancy.”—Jerusalem Post
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Beginning the Quest
Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin
Barry Cooper
University of Missouri Press, 2009
Beginning the Quest by Barry Cooper provides an analysis of the legal and political writings of Eric Voegelin during the 1920s and 1930s. The subject matter of his analyses during this time period was quite distinct from the focus of his concerns thirty years later.

It has often been noted that Voegelin was a pupil of Hans Kelsen, the author of the postwar Austrian constitution and one of the great legal minds of the twentieth century. The significance of the fact that Voegelin began his academic life as a legal scholar has not, however, been emphasized, though his background provides a strong contrast with that of his contemporaries Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.

Beginning the Quest opens with Voegelin’s efforts, following the trauma of defeat in World War I, at understanding the relation of law and the study of law (Staatslehre) to what he then called “sociohistorical reality.” Much of this writing consisted of methodological analysis and criticism centered chiefly on the status of neo-Kantian philosophy as the basis for what we now call the social sciences. Voegelin wished to push the scientific understanding of sociohistorical reality beyond the scope afforded by German social science.

Cooper discusses Voegelin’s first systematic effort to bring together the principles of philosophical anthropology (including philosophy of history) with his understanding of comparative social science and a theory of law more comprehensive than Kelsen’s. In developing his argument, Voegelin discovered the centrality of what he called “political ideas.”

Cooper also deals with Voegelin’s The Authoritarian State (1936), which argues that Austria was more an administrative unit than a body politic. It was, to say the least, a startling analysis, but one that reappeared in later writings as well, especially in The New Science of Politics.

As a final point, Cooper deals with the concept of “political religions” that Voegelin developed in the 1938 book of that name. Just as the Austrians were groping toward the formation of a body politic, so too were the Germans. Instead of the authoritarian state being the form that the German “political people” attained, it was, as Voegelin showed in his race books, quite different. Voegelin developed the term political religion to describe the animating core of the National Socialist regime. The formation of this concept reveals that Voegelin had moved from a focus on the legal structure of a polity to its spiritual order—in the example of Nazi Germany, an unquestionably “Satanic” order.

Cooper concludes that just as the great crisis of Voegelin’s youth—World War I and its aftermath—led him to question the received premises of the Staatslehre tradition in which he was schooled, so did the crisis resulting in World War II lead him to develop ever-more-comprehensive accounts of the disorder and political convulsions of the day. The “quest” of the title of this study continued until Voegelin’s death.
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Beginning to End the Climate Crisis
A History of Our Future
Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning
Brandeis University Press, 2023
There is no planet B. Activists share how we must inform and organize ourselves to save the future.
 
“Act as though your house is on fire. Because it is.” Following Greta Thunberg, millions of young climate activists have been taking to the streets around the globe as part of the Fridays For Future movement. They demand that we “unite behind the science,” as, for too long, climate scientists have been ringing the alarm bells about rising temperatures, tipping points, and the devastating consequences of extreme weather—but politicians do nothing.
 
So how do you begin to end the climate crisis? Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning begin by telling stories. Neubauer cofounded the youth climate activist group in Germany and has become its most prominent voice. In this book she and Repenning weave in personal accounts of their evolution as climate activists with a thorough analysis of how climate change impacts their generation, and what every one of us can and must do about it. The young and old in the United States and around the world can learn valuable lessons from their European counterparts.
 
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Beginning to See the Light
Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll
Ellen Willis
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

From the New Yorker’s inimitable first pop music critic comes this pioneering collection of essays by a conscientious writer whose political realm is both radical and rational, and whose prime preoccupations are with rock ’n’ roll, sexuality, and above all, freedom. Here Ellen Willis assuredly captures the thrill of music, the disdain of authoritarian culture, and the rebellious spirit of the ’60s and ’70s.

[more]

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Beginning Urdu
A Complete Course
Joshua H. Pien and Fauzia Farooqui
Georgetown University Press, 2016

eTextbooks are now available through VitalSource.com!

Beginning Urdu is a complete first-year textbook designed to help learners acquire the language by actively using it in real-life situations. The book and its accompanying audio files–available on the Press website–contain all that is needed to complete one full year of study, including clear explanations of language structures; useful, fun, and engaging activities; and an organizational format that makes it easy to chart student progress.

FEATURES• Develops all four skills—listening, speaking, reading, writing—through a wide range of tasks and activities, including role plays, games, and short conversations• Beautifully illustrated with full-color, authentic images and written in an accessible style• Introduces the sound system and script of Urdu• Organized around functional themes such as home and family, everyday life, the marketplace, personal responsibilities, and travel• Features straightforward grammatical explanations and topically organized vocabulary lists for each of the 34 chapters• Integrates cultural information within the thematic units and also presents culture through aphorisms, poetry, and photographs• Provides an activity set for each unit along with review activities, including tips for increasing fluency and sets of questions to help personalize learning• Contains Urdu–English and English–Urdu glossaries • Includes three appendices—Urdu numbers, additional grammatical structures for moving to advanced levels of proficiency, and a suggested syllabus Beginning Urdu covers approximately 150 contact hours and is designed to bring learners to the ACTFL proficiency level of mid- to high-intermediate in all four skills. The book also serves as a valuable resource for independent learners.

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Beginning with Plato
Poems
Joseph Warren Beach
University of Minnesota Press, 1944

Beginning with Plato was first published in 1944. 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.

These selected poems of Joseph Warren Beach range in time from the present year to the age of Pericles; in place from California to Shangri-La, from Paris to the Middle West; in theme from current political issues to the timeless problems of Greek philosophy; in mood from tender love to trenchant satire. In these fifty-odd poems is a rich variety—Anthony Eden and Cordell Hull, the French capital in the summer preceding the first World War, the skylines of the American West, the skylines of Minneapolis, soldier and swan maiden, and the inner life of man wherever lived. Mr. Beach can tell home truths without bitterness, and handle nostalgic emotion without sentimentality.

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The Beginnings of Anti-Jewish Legislation
The 1920 Numerus Clausus Law in Hungary
Mária M. Kovács
Central European University Press, 2023

The Nazi 1933 Civil Service Law and the 1935 Nuremberg Laws are often considered the first anti-Jewish decrees in interwar Europe. Mária M. Kovács convincingly argues that Hungary’s numerus clausus law of 1920, which introduced a Jewish quota at Hungary’s institutions of higher learning, was, in fact, interwar Europe’s first antisemitic law. By defining—and discriminating against—Jews as a separate “racial” or “national” group, it abrogated the principle of equal rights that had been enshrined into law; as such, it marked an abrupt reversal of Jewish emancipation in Hungary. Moreover, the numerus clausus law set the stage for subsequent “Jewish Laws” (in the late 1930s and early 1940s) that sought to solve Hungary’s “Jewish Question” by means of extraordinary legal measures that targeted Jews alone. This book examines the origins and implementation of the numerus clausus, as well as the attempts to dampen its impact on Hungary’s international reputation, focusing on the debates surrounding it promulgation (1920), its modification (1928) and its eventual application to other areas of Jewish life (1938–45).

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The Beginnings of Indian Philosophy
Selections from the Rig Veda, Atharva Veda, Upanisads, and Mahabharata, Translated from the Sanskrit with an Introduction, notes, and glossarial index
Franklin Edgerton
Harvard University Press

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The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775–1815
Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov
Harvard University Press, 1975

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The Beginnings of Social Understanding
Judy Dunn
Harvard University Press, 1988

When does our acknowledgment of the social contract really begin? When do young children first display an understanding of their social world? When and why do they begin to grasp that other people have feelings and thoughts like their own, yet different? In this pathbreaking work Judy Dunn explores several aspects of the early process of social discovery: children's recognition of the feelings of others, their ability to interpret and anticipate the behavior and relationships of others, and their comprehension of the prohibitions and accepted practices of their world.

Dunn's work brings into focus an apparent paradox in our current view of the very young child's social understanding. Whereas research on infancy reveals that babies are born with a predisposition to learn about other people, and appear sensitive to the emotions and behavior of others, experimental studies suggest that children of three, four, and five years of age have difficulty gauging the feelings, intentions, and perceptions of others. Why should this social intelligence--which might be expected to be high on the developmental agenda--proceed so slowly? Is the social understanding of young children really so limited? Dunn pursues answers to these questions through close observation of children in their homes, in the complex social world of the family; her findings suggest a sophistication that has not yet been appreciated or documented.

The Beginnings of Social Understanding draws upon observations and analyses from three longitudinal studies of children during the transition from infancy to childhood, examining children's disputes, jokes, play, their questions and narratives about others. The book demonstrates children's increasing subtlety as members of a cultural world, and argues that emotional relationships and family discourse play crucial roles in the development of this understanding. Dunn breaks through traditional notions of child development as she sets forth a refreshingly original perspective from which to view the social potential of children.

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The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620–1660
Joseph Frank
Harvard University Press

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The Beginnings of Western Science
The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450
David C. Lindberg
University of Chicago Press, 1992
This landmark book represents the first attempt in two decades to survey the science of the ancient world, the first attempt in four decades to write a comprehensive history of medieval science, and the first attempt ever to present a full, unified account of both ancient and medieval science in a single volume. In The Beginnings of Western Science, David C. Lindberg provides a rich chronicle of the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to the late-medieval scholastics.

Lindberg surveys all the most important themes in the history of ancient and medieval science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. He synthesizes a wealth of information in superbly organized, clearly written chapters designed to serve students, scholars, and nonspecialists alike. In addition, Lindberg offers an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe. And throughout the book he pays close attention to the cultural and institutional contexts within which scientific knowledge was created and disseminated and to the ways in which the content and practice of science were influenced by interaction with philosophy and religion. Carefully selected maps, drawings, and photographs complement the text.

Lindberg's story rests on a large body of important scholarship produced by historians of science, philosophy, and religion over the past few decades. However, Lindberg does not hesitate to offer new interpretations and to hazard fresh judgments aimed at resolving long-standing historical disputes. Addressed to the general educated reader as well as to students, his book will also appeal to any scholar whose interests touch on the history of the scientific enterprise.
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The Beginnings of Western Science
The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, Second Edition
David C. Lindberg
University of Chicago Press, 2008
When it was first published in 1992, The Beginnings of Western Science was lauded as the first successful attempt ever to present a unified account of both ancient and medieval science in a single volume. Chronicling the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from pre-Socratic Greek philosophy to late-Medieval scholasticism, David C. Lindberg surveyed all the most important themes in the history of science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. In addition, he offered an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe.
            The Beginnings of Western Science was, and remains, a landmark in the history of science, shaping the way students and scholars understand these critically formative periods of scientific development. It reemerges here in a second edition that includes revisions on nearly every page, as well as several sections that have been completely rewritten. For example, the section on Islamic science has been thoroughly retooled to reveal the magnitude and sophistication of medieval Muslim scientific achievement. And the book now reflects a sharper awareness of the importance of Mesopotamian science for the development of Greek astronomy. In all, the second edition of The Beginnings of Western Science captures the current state of our understanding of more than two millennia of science and promises to continue to inspire both students and general readers.
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Behavior Difficulties of Children as Perceived and Judged by Parents, Teachers, and Children Themselves
William Griffiths
University of Minnesota Press, 1952

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The Behavior of Communicating
An Ethological Approach
W. John Smith
Harvard University Press, 1977

In this book, W. John Smith enlarges ethology's perspective on communication and takes it in new directions. Traditionally, ethological analysis has focused on the motivational states of displaying animals: What makes the bird sing, the cat lash its tail, the bee dance? The Behavior of Communicating emphasizes messages. It seeks to answer questions about the information shared by animals through their displays: What information is made available to a bird by its neighbor's song, to a cat by its opponent's gesture, to a bee by its hivemate's dancing? What information is extracted from sources contextual to these displays? How are the responses to displays adaptive for recipients and senders? What evolutionary processes and constraints underlie observed patterns of animal communication?

Smith's approach is deeply rooted in the ethological tradition of naturalistic observations. Detailed analysis of observed displays and display repertoires illuminates the theoretical discussion that forms the core of the book. A taxonomy and interpretative analysis of messages made available through formalized display behavior are also developed. Smith shows that virtually all subhuman animal displays may be interpreted as transmitting messages about the communicator--not the environment--and, more specifically, that messages indicate the kinds of behavior the displaying animal may choose to perform. The most widespread behavioral messages are surprisingly general, even banal, in character; yet they make public information that is not readily available from other sources and that would otherwise be essentially private to the communicator. Taken along with information from sources contextual to the displays, the messages made available may permit responses that are markedly specific. By taking advantage of contextual specificity, a species expands the capacity of its display behavior to be functional in numerous and diverse circumstances.

After developing the concept of messages and discussing their forms, the responses made to them, and the functions engendered, Smith turns to the evolution of display behavior--the ways in which acts become specialized for communication and the nature of the evolutionary constraints affecting the ultimate forms of displays. He revises the traditional ethological concept of displays, and in a final chapter develops the further concept of formalized interactions. Here he extends the discussion to formal patterns of behavior that, unlike displays, are beyond the capabilities of individual performers. Human nonverbal communication, which is considered from time to time throughout the book, provides the richest examples of communication flexibly structured at this level of complexity.

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The Behavior of Federal Judges
A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice
Lee Epstein, William M. Landes, and Richard A. Posner
Harvard University Press, 2012

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made.

The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

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The Behavior of Texas Birds
By Kent Rylander
University of Texas Press, 2002

Whether it's the sudden, plunging dives of Brown Pelicans, the singing and aerial displays of Northern Mockingbirds, or the communal nesting of Purple Martins, innate and learned behaviors are some of the most fascinating things to observe in Texas birds. Even casual birdwatchers eventually ask, "why do they do that?" while serious birders and ornithologists seek to understand all the behaviors involved in feeding, flying, mating, and rearing young. But until now, it has been hard to find this information in one handy source.

In this comprehensive, yet easy-to-use book, Kent Rylander distills data from many sources to provide an authoritative guide to the behavior of Texas birds. He begins by explaining the principles of animal behavior and illustrating how they can be applied to interpreting bird behaviors in the field. The majority of the book is devoted to accounts of more than 400 species of birds that are most likely to be encountered by Texas birdwatchers. Each account describes such behaviors as feeding, courtship, parenting, and other behaviors that are significant for that species. References to interesting and important articles from scientific journals are incorporated in the species accounts where appropriate, and line drawings illustrate some of the behaviors described.

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The Behavior of the Earth
Continental and Seafloor Mobility
Claude Allègre
Harvard University Press, 1988

Well over a century after Darwin gave biology its unifying theory of evolution, the earth sciences experienced a similar revolution and the theory of plate tectonics took hold. Plate tectonics posed the idea that the earth's crust is divided into a number of large, thin plates always in motion relative to one another. In The Behavior of the Earth, world-renowned earth scientist Claude Allègre sets forth the exciting events in this contemporary revolution from its first stirrings in the nineteenth-century and Alfred Wegener's original model of continental drift (1912) through the development of its full potential in modern plate-tectonic theory.

Few scientific theories have been so all-encompassing, and none has surpassed plate tectonics in explaining such a wide variety of geological phenomena, from the origins of mountain building to the formation of the ocean floor. As it integrated our knowledge of the earth's surface with the investigation of its interior, plate tectonics fused two previously autonomous strains of scientific inquiry. Continental mobility changed for all time our view of the earth from a static globe to an evolving, living planet, and allowed us to see that changes in the earth's surface are but exterior manifestations of a dynamic interplay of forces within the crust and the mantle.Allègre casts his lucid exposition of this scientific theory within the historical context of its struggle for acceptance. As he introduces us to the huge cast of personalities and researchers who contributed to the theory, he illuminates the complex role that the scientific community plays in the proliferation and acceptance of new ideas. Allègre is as insightful in discussing the human motivation for scientific endeavor as he is skillful in presenting the science that results from this effort. Richly illustrated and including a glossary, this book offers the reader rare access both to the central theory of plate tectonics and to the constellation of problems and possibilities that preoccupy earth scientists today.

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Behavioral and Distributional Effects of Environmental Policy
Edited by Carlo Carraro and Gilbert E. Metcalf
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Most people would agree that it makes sense to tax a company that pollutes in a way that directly reflects the amount of environmental and social damage it has done. Yet in practice, such taxes are fraught with difficulty and have far-reaching implications. A company facing a new tax may lay off workers, for example, exacerbating an unemployment problem. This volume focuses on such external issues and examines in detail the trade-offs involved in designing policies to deal with environmental problems. Reflecting the broad nature of the subject, the contributors include leading economists in the areas of public finance, industrial organization, and trade theory, as well as environmental economists. Integrating both theoretical and empirical methods, they examine environmental policy design as it relates to location decisions, compliance costs, administrative costs, effects on research and development, and international factor movements. Shedding light on an extraordinarily complex and important topic, this collection will be of interest to all those involved in designing effective environmental policy.
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Behavioral Archaeology
Michael Brian Schiffer
University of Utah Press, 1995

Behavioral archaeology is an emerging branch of anthropology emphasizing the study of relationships between human behavior and artifacts (material culture) in all times and places. As such, it aspires to make contributions beyond the confines of archaeology to other behavioral sciences and to society in general.

Behavioral Archaeology is a selection of writings by Michael Schiffer, one of the field’s primary proponents. The chapters include important works published between 1972 and 1987, the formative period of behavioral archaeology. Schiffer has crafted a lengthy introduction to the coume, a personal history that contextualizes the development of these works. Also new is the last chapter, which lists—and keys to the preceding chapters—the field’s most important principles, tenets, and premises.

Readers will discover that although behavioral archaeologist have put archaeological inference on a scientific footing and have fostered the growth of experimental archaeology and ethnoarchaeology as research strategies, behavioral archaeology is not confined to methodology.

Indeed, cultivation of the fields established here is leading to the development of new behavioral science focused on studies of people-artifact interactions. By closely juxtaposing method and theory, principles and applications, science and history, this book illustrates the coherence and scope of behavioral archaeology’s conceptual framework.

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The Behavioral Ecology of Efe Pygmy Men in the Ituri Forest, Zaire
Robert C. Bailey
University of Michigan Press, 1991
Robert C. Bailey reports on his observations of sixteen Efe Pygmy men in northeastern Zaire. Bailey lived and worked with the men and their families in the northern Ituri Forest from March 1980 to January 1982—his research was part of a multidisciplinary project called the Ituri Project. Bailey presents data on food production, subsistence behaviors, hunting techniques, relationships between hunters and village dwellers, and other aspects of the Efe society. Foreword by John D. Speth.
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Behavioral Health Care Delivery Following the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Utilization, Telehealth, and Quality of Care for Service Members with PTSD, Depression, or Substance Use Disorder
Kimberly A. Hepner
RAND Corporation, 2023
This report examines changes in behavioral health care delivered to service members by the Military Health System following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, including patterns of care, use of telehealth, and quality of care. The findings and recommendations are intended to inform improvements to behavioral health care in the Military Health System and provide insights into the implications of its ongoing integration of telehealth.
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Behavioral Mechanisms in Ecology
Douglass H. Morse
Harvard University Press, 1980

This readable text represents a much needed synthesis of ecological insight into animal behavior. The field of behavioral ecology is relatively new, having evolved from a combination of classical ethology, as developed by Lorenz and Tinbergen, and population ecology. Now for the first time, a single author integrates the vast literature on animal ecology and behavior into a conceptual whole.

Exploring the theme of resource acquisitions, Douglass H. Morse combines the comparative approach to biology with models based on evolutionary theory. Secondary consequences of sexual selection and other selective pressures are considered in detail. Discussion of interspecific interactions and constraints is especially rich, as is the treatment of foraging theory, kinship theory, habitat selection and predator avoidance. Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement, however, is its unparalleled ecological and evolutionary analysis of individual differences.

Behavioral Mechanisms in Ecology will meet the teaching and reference needs of an extremely broad audience of professional biologists.

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Behavioral Mechanisms in Evolutionary Ecology
Leslie A. Real
University of Chicago Press, 1994
The first book-length exploration of behavioral mechanisms in evolutionary ecology, this ambitious volume illuminates long-standing questions about cause-and-effect relations between an animal's behavior and its environment. By focusing on biological mechanisms—the sum of an animal's cognitive, neural, developmental, and hormonal processes—leading researchers demonstrate how the integrated study of animal physiology, cognitive processes, and social interaction can yield an enriched understanding of behavior.

With studies of species ranging from insects to primates, the contributors examine how various animals identify and use environmental resources and deal with ecological constraints, as well as the roles of learning, communication, and cognitive aspects of social interaction in behavioral evolution. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how the study of internal mechanistic foundations of behavior in relation to their ecological and evolutionary contexts and outcomes provides valuable insight into such behaviors as predation, mating, and dispersal.

Behavioral Mechanisms in Evolutionary Ecology shows how a mechanistic approach unites various levels of biological organization to provide a broader understanding of the biological bases of behavioral evolution.
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The Behavioral Origins of War
D. Scott Bennett and Allan C. Stam
University of Michigan Press, 2003
In The Behavioral Origins of War, D. Scott Bennett and Allan C. Stam analyze systemic, binary, and individual factors in order to evaluate a wide variety of theories about the origins of war.
Challenging the view that theories of war are nothing more than competing explanations for observed behavior, this expansive study incorporates variables from multiple theories and thus accounts for war's multiplicity of causes. While individual theories offer partial explanations for international conflict, only a valid set of theories can provide a complete explanation. Bennett and Stam's unconventional yet methodical approach opens the way for cumulative scientific progress in international relations.
D. Scott Bennett is Professor of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University. Allan C. Stam is Associate Professor in the Government Department at Dartmouth College.
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Behavioral Public Finance
Edward J. McCaffery
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
Behavioral economics questions the basic underpinnings of economic theory, showing that people often do not act consistently in their own self-interest when making economic decisions. While these findings have important theoretical implications, they also provide a new lens for examining public policies, such as taxation, public spending, and the provision of adequate pensions. How can people be encouraged to save adequately for retirement when evidence shows that they tend to spend their money as soon as they can? Would closer monitoring of income tax returns lead to more honest taxpayers or a more distrustful, uncooperative citizenry? Behavioral Public Finance, edited by Edward McCaffery and Joel Slemrod, applies the principles of behavioral economics to government's role in constructing economic and social policies of these kinds and suggests that programs crafted with rational participants in mind may require redesign. Behavioral Public Finance looks at several facets of economic life and asks how behavioral research can increase public welfare. Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Jeff Strnad note that public support for a tax often depends not only on who bears its burdens, but also on how the tax is framed. For example, people tend to prefer corporate taxes over sales taxes, even though the cost of both is eventually extracted from the consumer. James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, and Andrew Metrick assess the impact of several different features of 401(k) plans on employee savings behavior. They find that when employees are automatically enrolled in a retirement savings plan, they overwhelmingly accept the status quo and continue participating, while employees without automatic enrollment typically take over a year to join the saving plan. Behavioral Public Finance also looks at taxpayer compliance. While the classic economic model suggests that the low rate of IRS audits means far fewer people should voluntarily pay their taxes than actually do, John Cullis, Philip Jones, and Alan Lewis present new research showing that many people do not underreport their incomes even when the probability of getting caught is a mere one percent. Human beings are not always rational, utility-maximizing economic agents. Behavioral economics has shown how human behavior departs from the assumptions made by generations of economists. Now, Behavioral Public Finance brings the insights of behavioral economics to analysis of policies that affect us all.
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Behavioral Sciences and the Mass Media
Frederick T. C. Yu
Russell Sage Foundation, 1968
Presents papers which were discussed at the Arden House Conference—a conference held to establish a working relationship between sociologists at the Russell Sage Foundation and journalists of the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University. Both behavioral science and journalism have for a long time been concerned with some of the same major national social problems—juvenile delinquency, urban problems, race and minority group relations, international tensions, and labor relations. These papers touch on some of the barriers to communication and point to possible ways of breaking through those barriers.
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Behavioral Simulation Methods in Tax Policy Analysis
Edited by Martin Feldstein
University of Chicago Press, 1983
These thirteen papers and accompanying commentaries are the first fruits of an ongoing research project that has concentrated on developing simulation models that incorporate the behavioral responses of individuals and businesses to alternative tax rules and rates and on expanding computational general equilibrium models that analyze the long-run effects of changes on the economy as a whole.

The principal focus of the project has been on the microsimulation of individual behavior. Thus, this volume includes studies of individual responses to an over reduction in tax rates and to changes in the highest tax rates; a study of alternative tax treatments of the family; and studies of such specific aspects of household behavior as tax treatment of home ownership, charitable contributions, and individual saving behavior. Microsimulation techniques are also used to estimate the effects of alternative policies on the long-run financial status of the social security program and to examine the effects of alternative tax rules on corporate investment and of foreign-source income on overseas investment.

The papers devoted to the development of general equilibrium simulation models to include an examination of the implications of international trade and capital flows, a study of the effects of capital taxation that uses a closed economy equilibrium model, and an examination of the effect of switching to an inflation-indexed tax system. In the volume's final paper, a life-cycle model in which individuals maximize lifetime utility subject to a lifetime budget constraint is used to simulate the effects of tax rules on personal savings.
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Behaviour in the Classroom
The Practical Guide
Olivia Dear
Amsterdam University Press

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Behavioural Modelling and Simulation of Bicycle Traffic
Ling Huang
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021
Cycling is an important part of the urban transport system and short-distance travel in many modern cities around the world. With no emissions and occupying much less road space than cars, bikes are clean and sustainable. Bicycle traffic needs to be tracked and analysed in order to generate reliable predictions and make correct decisions when adapting and building traffic infrastructure, to account for bikes in road traffic systems, and to model and plan interactions between bikes and autonomous vehicles.
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Beheading the Saint
Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec
Geneviève Zubrzycki
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Through much of its existence, Québec’s neighbors called it the “priest-ridden province.” Today, however, Québec society is staunchly secular, with a modern welfare state built on lay provision of social services—a transformation rooted in the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s.
            In Beheading the Saint, Geneviève Zubrzycki studies that transformation through a close investigation of the annual Feast of St. John the Baptist of June 24. The celebrations of that national holiday, she shows, provided a venue for a public contesting of the dominant ethno-Catholic conception of French Canadian identity and, via the violent rejection of Catholic symbols, the articulation of a new, secular Québécois identity. From there, Zubrzycki extends her analysis to the present, looking at the role of Québécois identity in recent debates over immigration, the place of religious symbols in the public sphere, and the politics of cultural heritage—issues that also offer insight on similar debates elsewhere in the world.
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Behemoth or The Long Parliament
Thomas Hobbes
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Behemoth, or The Long Parliament is essential to any reader interested in the historical context of the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). In De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651), the great political philosopher had developed an analytical framework for discussing sedition, rebellion, and the breakdown of authority. Behemoth, completed around 1668 and not published until after Hobbe's death, represents the systematic application of this framework to the English Civil War.

In his insightful and substantial Introduction, Stephen Holmes examines the major themes and implications of Behemoth in Hobbes's system of thought. Holmes notes that a fresh consideration of Behemoth dispels persistent misreadings of Hobbes, including the idea that man is motivated solely by a desire for self-preservation. Behemoth, which is cast as a series of dialogues between a teacher and his pupil, locates the principal cause of the Civil War less in economic interests than in the stubborn irrationality of key actors. It also shows more vividly than any of Hobbe's other works the importance of religion in his theories of human nature and behavior.
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Behind Closed Doors
IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research
Laura Stark
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Although the subject of federally mandated Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) has been extensively debated, we actually do not know much about what takes place when they convene. The story of how IRBs work today is a story about their past as well as their present, and Behind Closed Doors is the first book to meld firsthand observations of IRB meetings with the history of how rules for the treatment of human subjects were formalized in the United States in the decades after World War II.
 
Drawing on extensive archival sources, Laura Stark reconstructs the daily lives of scientists, lawyers, administrators, and research subjects working—and “warring”—on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, where they first wrote the rules for the treatment of human subjects. Stark argues that the model of group deliberation that gradually crystallized during this period reflected contemporary legal and medical conceptions of what it meant to be human, what political rights human subjects deserved, and which stakeholders were best suited to decide. She then explains how the historical contingencies that shaped rules for the treatment of human subjects in the postwar era guide decision making today—within hospitals, universities, health departments, and other institutions in the United States and across the globe. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Behind Closed Doors will be essential reading for sociologists and historians of science and medicine, as well as policy makers and IRB administrators.
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Behind Closed Doors
Sex Education Transformed
Natalie Fiennes
Pluto Press, 2019
One thing we know for certain is that sex is personal: perhaps the most intimate thing of all. But sex is also shaped by a complicated web of cultural, social and political forces outside of ourselves.

Fear-mongering, moral panic and outdated attitudes prevail, but if #MeToo has taught us anything, it's how dangerous it is to keep conversations about sex hidden from view. Behind Closed Doors invests in a radical, inclusive and honest sex education, taking us beyond learning about the 'birds and the bees', to identifying inequality that stands in the way of sexual freedom.

From contraceptives to virginity, consent to pornography, transphobia to sexual abuse, the book shows how our desires are influenced by powerful political processes that can be transformed.
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Behind Closed Doors
Women's Oral Narratives in Tunis
Hejaiej, Monia
Rutgers University Press, 1996

Tunis has a long history of city life reaching back to ancient times. The Arabic language is firmly rooted among its inhabitants and most embrace the morals and culture of Islam. Behind Closed Doors presents forty-seven tales told by three Beldi women, members of a historic and highly civilized community, the city's traditional elite. Tale-telling is important to all Beldi women, and the book examines its role in their shared world and its significance in the lives of the three tellers.

Tales are told at communal gatherings to share and pass on Beldi women's secret lore of love, marriage and destiny. Ghaya Sa'diyya and Kheira tell stories which echo their life experience and have deep meanings for them. Their tales reflect accepted moral codes, and yet many depict attitudes, relationships, and practices that contradict established norms. Whereas Kheira presents a conservative and moralistic view of the role of women, Sa'diyya's heroines are alive with sexual energy, and Ghaya's stories also offer racy and rebellious comments on a woman's lot. These contradictory visions offer a kaleidoscopic view of the position of women in the rich life of a historic North African city.

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Behind Every Choice Is a Story
Gloria Feldt
University of North Texas Press, 2002

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Behind Spanish American Footlights
By Willis Knapp Jones
University of Texas Press, 1966

Across a five-hundred-year sweep of history, Willis Knapp Jones surveys the native drama and the Spanish influence upon it in nineteen South American countries, and traces the development of their national theatres to the 1960s. This volume, filled with a fascinating array of information, sparkles with wit while giving the reader a fact-filled course in the history of Spanish American drama that he can get nowhere else.

This is the first book in English ever to consider the theatre of all the Spanish American countries. Even in Spanish, the pioneer study that covers the whole field was also written by Jones.

Jones sees the history of a nation in the history of its drama. Pre-Columbian Indians, conquistadores, missionary priests, viceroys, dictators, and national heroes form a background of true drama for the main characters here—those who wrote and produced and acted in the make-believe drama of the times.

The theatre mirrors the whole life of the community, Jones believes, and thus he offers information about geography, military events, and economics, and follows the politics of state and church through dramatists’ offerings. Examining the plays of a people down the centuries, he shows how the many cultural elements of both Old and New Worlds have been blended into the distinct national characteristics of each of the Spanish American countries.

He does full justice to the subject he loves. A lively storyteller, he adds tidbits of spice and laughter, long-buried vignettes of history, tales of politics and drama, stories of high and low life, plots of plays, bits of verse, accounts of dalliance and of hard work, and sad and happy endings of rulers and peons, dramatists, actors, and clowns.

A valuable appendix is a selected reading guide, listing the outstanding works of important Spanish American dramatists. A generous bibliography is a useful addition for scholars.

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Behind the Academic Curtain
How to Find Success and Happiness with a PhD
Frank F. Furstenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2013
More people than ever are going to graduate school to seek a PhD these days. When they get there, they discover a bewildering environment: a rapid immersion in their discipline, a keen competition for resources, and uncertain options for their future, whether inside or outside of academia. Life with a PhD can begin to resemble an unsolvable maze. In Behind the Academic Curtain, Frank F. Furstenberg offers a clear and user-friendly map to this maze. Drawing on decades of experience in academia, he provides a comprehensive, empirically grounded, and, most important of all, practical guide to academic life.

While the greatest anxieties for PhD candidates and postgrads are often centered on getting that tenure-track dream job, each stage of an academic career poses a series of distinctive problems. Furstenberg divides these stages into five chapters that cover the entire trajectory of an academic life, including how to make use of a PhD outside of academia. From finding the right job to earning tenure, from managing teaching loads to conducting research, from working on committees to easing into retirement, he illuminates all the challenges and opportunities an academic can expect to encounter. Each chapter is designed for easy consultation, with copious signposts, helpful suggestions, and a bevy of questions that all academics should ask themselves throughout their career, whether at a major university, junior college, or a nonacademic organization. An honest and up-to-date portrayal of how this life really works, Behind the Academic Curtain is an essential companion for any scholar, at any stage of his or her career.
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Behind the Angel of History
The "Angelus Novus" and Its Interleaf
Annie Bourneuf
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The story of artist R. H. Quaytman’s discovery of an engraving hidden behind a famous artwork by Paul Klee.
 
This book begins with artist R. H. Quaytman uncovering something startling about a picture by Paul Klee. Pasted beneath Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus—famous for its role in the writings of its first owner, Walter Benjamin—Quaytman found that Klee had interleaved a nineteenth-century engraving of Martin Luther, leaving just enough visible to provoke questions.
 
Behind the Angel of History reveals why this hidden face matters, delving into the intertwined artistic, political, and theological issues consuming Germany in the wake of the Great War. With the Angelus Novus, Klee responded to a growing call for a new religious art. For Benjamin, Klee’s Angelus became bound up with the prospect of meaningful dialogue among religions in Germany.
 
Reflecting on Klee’s, Benjamin’s, and Quaytman’s strategies of superimposing conflicting images, Annie Bourneuf reveals new dimensions of complexity in this iconic work and the writing it inspired.
 
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Behind the Backlash
Muslim Americans After 9/11
Lori Peek
Temple University Press, 2010

As the nation tried to absorb the shock of the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans were caught up in an unprecedented wave of backlash violence. Public discussion revealed that widespread misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Islam persisted, despite the striking diversity of the Muslim community.

Letting the voices of 140 ordinary Muslim American men and women describe their experiences, Lori Peek's path-breaking book, Behind the Backlash presents moving accounts of prejudice and exclusion. Muslims speak of being subjected to harassment before the attacks, and recount the discrimination they encountered afterwards. Peek also explains the struggles of young Muslim adults to solidify their community and define their identity during a time of national crisis.

Behind the Backlash seeks to explain why blame and scapegoating occur after a catastrophe. Peek sets the twenty-first century experience of Muslim Americans, who were vilified and victimized, in the context of larger sociological and psychological processes. Peek’s book will be of interest to those in disaster research studies, sociology of religion, and race and ethnic relations.

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Behind the Bamboo Hedge
The Impact of the Homeland Politics in the Parisian Vietnamese Community
Gisele L. Bousquet
University of Michigan Press, 1991
Studies the critical role homeland politics plays in Vietnamese immigrants' assimilation into the host society
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Behind the Big House
Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South
Jodi Skipper
University of Iowa Press, 2022
2022 Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group Nelson Graburn Prize, winner

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

In laying out her experiences through an autoethnographic approach, Skipper seeks to help other activist scholars of color negotiate the nuances of place, the academic public sphere, and its ambiguous systems of reward, recognition, and evaluation.
 
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Behind the Book
Eleven Authors on Their Path to Publication
Chris Mackenzie Jones
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Every book has a story of its own, a path leading from the initial idea that sparked it to its emergence into the world in published form. No two books follow quite the same path, but all are shaped by a similar array of market forces and writing craft concerns as well as by a cast of characters stretching beyond the author.
Behind the Book explores how eleven contemporary first-time authors, in genres ranging from post-apocalyptic fiction to young adult fantasy to travel memoir, navigated these pathways with their debut works. Based on extensive interviews with the authors, it covers the process of writing and publishing a book from beginning to end, including idea generation, developing a process, building a support network, revising the manuscript, finding the right approach to publication, building awareness, and ultimately moving on to the next project. It also includes insights from editors, agents, publishers, and others who helped to bring these projects to life.
Unlike other books on writing craft, Behind the Book looks at the larger picture of how an author’s work and choices can affect the outcome of a project. The authors profiled in each story open up about their challenges, mistakes, and successes. While their paths to publication may be unique, together they offer important lessons that authors of all types can apply to their own writing journeys.
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Behind the Burnt Cork Mask
Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture
William J. Mahar
University of Illinois Press, 1999

The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular in antebellum America. Drawing on an unprecedented archival study of playbills, newspapers, sketches, monologues, and music, William J. Mahar explores the racist practices of minstrel entertainers and considers their performances as troubled representations of ethnicity, class, gender, and culture in the nineteenth century. 

Mahar investigates the relationships between blackface comedy and other Western genres and traditions; between the music of minstrel shows and its European sources; and between "popular" and "elite" constructions of culture. Locating minstrel performances within their complex sites of production, Mahar reassesses the historiography of the field.

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Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing
Editors in Writing Studies
Greg Giberson
Utah State University Press, 2022
Until now there has been little consideration of the intellectual and historical impact editors have had on the young and ever-evolving field of writing studies. Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing provides new and seasoned scholars with behind-the-scenes explorations and expositions of the history of scholarly editing and the role of the scholarly editor from the perspectives of current and former editors from important publications within the field.
 
Each chapter in the collection examines the unique experiences and individual contributions of its authors during their time as editors, offering advice to scholars and potential editors on how to navigate the publication process and understand editorial roles. The contributors provide multiple perspectives on the growth, transformation, and, in some cases, founding of some of the most influential publishing venues in writing studies.
 
The personal and historical narratives, along with the unique perspectives and insightful analyses of the individual authors in Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing, offer needed transparency and context to what has historically been an opaque, yet inevitable and consequential, part of academic life. This volume will help researchers in the field understand the publishing process.
 
Contributors: Cheryl Ball, David Bartholomae, Charles Bazerman, Jean Ferguson Carr, Douglas Eyman, Muriel Harris, Byron Hawk, Alice Horning, Paul Kei Matsuda, Laura Micciche, Mike Palmquist, Michael Pemberton, Malea Powell, Kelly Ritter, Victor Villanueva, Victor Vitanza, Kathleen Blake Yancey
 
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Behind the Development Banks
Washington Politics, World Poverty, and the Wealth of Nations
Sarah Babb
University of Chicago Press, 2009

The World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) carry out their mission to alleviate poverty and promote economic growth based on the advice of professional economists. But as Sarah Babb argues in Behind the Development Banks, these organizations have also been indelibly shaped by Washington politics—particularly by the legislative branch and its power of the purse.

            Tracing American influence on MDBs over three decades, this volume assesses increased congressional activism and the perpetual “selling” of banks to Congress by the executive branch. Babb contends that congressional reluctance to fund the MDBs has enhanced the influence of the United States on them by making credible America’s threat to abandon the banks if its policy preferences are not followed. At a time when the United States’ role in world affairs is being closely scrutinized, Behind the Development Banks will be necessary reading for anyone interested in how American politics helps determine the fate of developing countries.

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Behind the Gas Mask
The U.S. Chemical Warfare Service in War and Peace
Thomas Faith
University of Illinois Press, 2014
In Behind the Gas Mask, Thomas Faith offers an institutional history of the Chemical Warfare Service, the department tasked with improving the Army's ability to use and defend against chemical weapons during and after World War One. Taking the CWS's story from the trenches to peacetime, he explores how the CWS's work on chemical warfare continued through the 1920s despite deep opposition to the weapons in both military and civilian circles.
 
As Faith shows, the believers in chemical weapons staffing the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life--and ultimately led to the U.S. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons.
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Behind the Guns
The History of Battery I, 2nd Regiment, Illinois Light Artillery
Thaddeus C. S. Brown, Samuel J. Murphy, and William G. Putney. Edited with a Foreword by Clyde C. Walton
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Much has been written of the infantry and the cavalry during the Civil War, but little attention has been paid the artillery. Through the battles of Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge in 1863 and the Atlanta Campaign of 1864 and with General Sherman’s forces on the famous March to the Sea, the acts of a courageous fighting group are vividly recounted in Behind the Guns: The History of Battery I, 2nd Regiment, Illinois Light Artillery. Originally published in 1965 in a limited edition, this regimental history of a light artillery unit was written by three of its soldiers, including the bugler.

            

Battery I was formed in 1861 by Charles W. Keith of Joliet and Henry B. Plant of Peoria. More than a hundred men were mustered into service in December near Springfield and left for Cairo in February 1862. The battery trained at Camp Paine across the Ohio River in Kentucky until March, when the men were dispatched to the South. During the war, the Battery was attached to three different armies: the Army of the Mississippi, the Army of the Ohio, and the Army of the Cumberland.

            

Clyde C. Walton’s foreword and the narrative discuss the variety of weapons used by the unit, including James, Parrott, and Rodman guns and the bronze, muzzle-loading Napoleons that fired twelve-pound projectiles. The book also includes an account of the prisoner-of-war experience of Battery I lieutenant Charles McDonald, biographical sketches of the battery soldiers, and eighteen maps and five line drawings.

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Behind the Lines
Bugulma and Other Stories
Jaroslav Hasek
Karolinum Press, 2012

Jaroslav Hašek is a Czech writer most famous for his wickedly funny, widely read, yet incomplete novel The Good Soldier Schweik, a series of absurdist vignettes about a recalcitrant WWI soldier. Hašek—in spite of a life of buffoonery and debauchery—was remarkably prolific. He wrote hundreds of short stories that all display both his extraordinary gift for satire and his profound distrust of authority. Behind the Lines presents a series of nine short stories first published in the Prague Tribune and considered to be some of Hašek’s best. Based on his experiences as a Red Commissar in the Russian Civil War and his return to Czechoslovakia, Behind the Lines focuses on the Russian town of Bugulma, taking aim, with mordant wit, at the absurdities of a revolution.

Providing important background and insight into The Good Soldier Schweik, this collection by a writer some call the Bolshevik Mark Twain is nevertheless much more than a tool for understanding his better-known novel; it is a significant work in its own right. A hidden gem remarkable for its modern, ribald sense of humor, Behind the Lines is an enjoyable, fast-paced anthology of great literary and historical value.

 
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Behind the Lines
Bugulma and Other Stories
Jaroslav Hasek
Karolinum Press, 2012

Jaroslav Hašek is a Czech writer most famous for his wickedly funny, widely read, yet incomplete novel The Good Soldier Schweik, a series of absurdist vignettes about a recalcitrant WWI soldier. Hašek—in spite of a life of buffoonery and debauchery—was remarkably prolific. He wrote hundreds of short stories that all display both his extraordinary gift for satire and his profound distrust of authority. Behind the Lines presents a series of nine short stories first published in the Prague Tribune and considered to be some of Hašek’s best. Based on his experiences as a Red Commissar in the Russian Civil War and his return to Czechoslovakia, Behind the Lines focuses on the Russian town of Bugulma, taking aim, with mordant wit, at the absurdities of a revolution.

Providing important background and insight into The Good Soldier Schweik, this collection by a writer some call the Bolshevik Mark Twain is nevertheless much more than a tool for understanding his better-known novel; it is a significant work in its own right. A hidden gem remarkable for its modern, ribald sense of humor, Behind the Lines is an enjoyable, fast-paced anthology of great literary and historical value.

 
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Behind the Lines
War Resistance Poetry on the American Home Front since 1941
Philip Metres
University of Iowa Press, 2007
Whether Thersites in Homer’s Iliad, Wilfred Owen in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” or Allen Ginsberg in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” poets have long given solitary voice against the brutality of war. The hasty cancellation of the 2003 White House symposium “Poetry and the American Voice” in the face of protests by Sam Hamill and other invited guests against the coming “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq reminded us that poetry and poets still have the power to challenge the powerful.
    Behind the Lines investigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart of who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented. As such, he explores a largely neglected area of scholarship: the poet’s relationship to dissenting political movements and the nation.
    In his elegant study, Metres examines the ways in which war resistance is registered not only in terms of its content but also at the level of the lyric. He proposes that protest poetry constitutes a subgenre that—by virtue of its preoccupation with politics, history, and trauma—probes the limits of American lyric poetry. Thus, war resistance poetry—and the role of what Shelley calls unacknowledged legislators—is a crucial, though largely unexamined, body of writing that stands at the center of dissident political movements.
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Behind the Mask
Destruction and Creativity in Women’s Aggression
Dana Crowley Jack
Harvard University Press, 1999

This boldly original book explores the origins, meanings, and forms of women's aggression. Drawing from in-depth interviews with sixty women of different ages and ethnic and class backgrounds--police officers, attorneys, substance abusers, homemakers, artists--Dana Jack provides a rich account of how women explain (or explain away) their own hidden or actual acts of hurt to others. With sensitivity but without sentimentality, Jack gives readers a range of compelling stories of how women channel, either positively or destructively, their own powerful force and of how they resist and retaliate in the face of others' aggression in a society that expects women to be yielding, empathetic, and supportive.

Arguing that aggression arises from failures in relationships, Jack portrays the many forms that women's aggression can take, from veiled approaches used to resist, control, and take vengeance on others, to aggression that reflects despair, to aggression that may be a hopeful sign of new strength. Throughout the book, Jack shows the positive sides of aggression as women struggle with internal and external demons, reconnect with others, and create the courage to stand their ground. This work broadens our understanding of aggression as an interpersonal phenomenon rooted in societal expectations, and offers exciting new approaches for exploring the variations of this vexing human experience.

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Behind the Mask
Gender Hybridity in a Zapotec Community
Alfredo Mirandé
University of Arizona Press, 2017
The image of biologically male people dancing while dressed in the traditional, colorful attire of Zapotec, Juchiteca, females stands in sharp contrast to the prevailing view of Mexico as the land of charros, machismo, and unbridled ranchero masculinity. These indigenous people are called los muxes, and they are neither man nor woman, but rather a hybrid third gender.

After seeing a video of a muxe vela, or festival, sociologist Alfredo Mirandé was intrigued by the contradiction between Mexico’s patriarchal reputation and its warm acceptance of los muxes. Seeking to get past traditional Mexican masculinity, he presents us with Behind the Mask, which combines historical analysis, ethnographic field research, and interviews conducted with los muxes of Juchitán over a period of seven years. Mirandé observed community events, attended muxe velas, and interviewed both muxes and other Juchitán residents. Prefaced by an overview of the study methods and sample, the book challenges the ideology of a male-dominated Mexican society driven by the cult of machismo, featuring photos alongside four appendixes.

Delving into many aspects of their lives and culture, the author discusses how the muxes are perceived by others, how the muxes perceive themselves, and the acceptance of a third gender status among various North American indigenous groups. Mirandé compares traditional Mexicano/Latino conceptions of gender and sexuality to modern or Western object choice configurations. He concludes by proposing a new hybrid model for rethinking these seemingly contradictory and conflicting gender systems.
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Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman
Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance
Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant
Temple University Press, 2009
The defining quality of Black womanhood is strength, states Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant in Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman. But, she argues, the idea of strength undermines its real function: to defend and maintain a stratified social order by obscuring Black women’s experiences of suffering, acts of desperation, and anger. This provocative book lays bare the common perception that strength is an exemplary or defining quality of “authentic” Black womanhood.

The author, a noted sociologist, interviews 58 Black women about being strong and proud, to illustrate their “performance” of invulnerability. Beauboeuf-Lafontant explains how such behavior leads to serious symptoms for these women, many of whom suffer from eating disorders and depression.

Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, cultural studies, and women’s history, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman traces the historical and social influences of normative Black femininity, looking at how notions of self-image and strength create a distraction from broader forces of discrimination and power.
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Behind the Mask
Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID
Ben Bridges
Utah State University Press, 2023
Vernacular responses have been crucial for communities seeking creative ways to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. With most people locked down and separated from the normal ebb and flow of life for an extended period of time, COVID-19 inspired community and creativity, adaptation and flexibility, traditional knowledge, resistance, and dynamism. Removing people from assumed norms and daily lives, the pandemic provided a moment of insight into the nature of vernacular culture as it was used, abused, celebrated, critiqued, and discarded. In Behind the Mask, contributors from the USA, the UK, and Scandinavia emphasize the choices that individual people and communities made during the COVID pandemic, prioritizing the everyday lives of people enduring this health crisis.
 
Despite vernacular’s potential nod to dominant or external culture, it is the strong connection to the local that grounds the vernacular within the experiential context that it occupies. Exploring the nature and shape of vernacular responses to the ongoing public health crisis, Behind the Mask documents processes that are otherwise likely to be forgotten. Including different ethnographic presents, contributors capture moments during the pandemic rather than upon reflection, making the work important to students and scholars of folklore and ethnology, as well as general readers interested in the COVID pandemic.
 
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Behind the Mexican Mountains
By Robert Zingg
University of Texas Press, 2001

In 1930, anthropologists Robert Zingg and Wendell Bennett spent nine months among the Tarahumara of Chihuahua, Mexico, one of the least acculturated indigenous societies in North America. Their fieldwork resulted in The Tarahumara: An Indian Tribe of Northern Mexico (1935), a classic ethnography still familiar to anthropologists. In addition to this formal work, Zingg also penned a personal, unvarnished travelogue of his sojourn among the Tarahumara. Unpublished in his lifetime, Behind the Mexican Mountains is now available in print for the first time.

This colorful account provides a compelling description of the landscape, people, traditions, language, and archaeology of the Tarahumara region. Abandoning the scientific detachment of the observer, Zingg frankly records his reactions to the people and their customs as he vividly evokes the daily experience of doing fieldwork. In the introduction, Howard Campbell examines Zingg's writing in light of current critiques of anthropology as literature. He makes a strong case that although earlier anthropological writing reveals unacceptable cultural biases, it also demonstrates the ongoing importance and vitality of field research.

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Behind the Privet Hedge
Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain
Michael Gilson
Reaktion Books, 2024
The surprising origin story of Britain’s love affair with suburban gardening.
 
It is said that Britain is a nation of gardeners and its suburban gardens with roses and privet hedges are widely admired and copied across the world. But how and why did millions across the United Kingdom develop an obsession with colorful plots of land to begin with? Behind the Privet Hedge seeks to answer this question and reveals how, despite their stereotype as symbols of dull middle-class conformity, these open spaces were once seen as a tool to bring about social change in the early twentieth century. The book restores to the story a remarkable but long-forgotten figure, Richard Sudell, who spent a lifetime evangelizing for gardens as the vanguard of a more egalitarian society.
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Behind the Red Mist
Short Fiction by Ho Anh Thai
Ho Anh Thai
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Behind the Red Mist gives us for the first time in English a wide range of stories from the most important writer of the post-war generation in Vietnam. The characters range from a party official who turns into a goat while watching porno movies, to an Indian who carries his mother's bones in his knapsack, to a war widow trying desperately to piece together her life through the fragments of debris she collects from her back yard. The title novella "Behind the Red Mist" is a Vietnamese "Back To the Future", a social satire in which a young man in the Hanoi of the eighties receives an electric shock and is transported back to his same apartment block in 1967 wartime Vietnam during the American bombing. He not only witnesses the war with the eyes of someone who knows its outcome, but participates in his parents' courtship and discovers some truths about the generation held up to his own as a role model.
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Behind the Scenes
Covering the JFK Assassination
Darwin Payne
University of North Texas Press, 2023

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Behind the Search Box
Google and the Global Internet Industry
ShinJoung Yeo
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Once seen as a harbinger of a new enlightened capitalism, Google has become a model of robber baron rapaciousness thanks to its ruthless monetizing of private data, obsession with monopoly, and pervasive systems of labor discrimination and exploitation. Using the company as a jumping-off point, ShinJoung Yeo explores the political economy of the search engine industry against the backdrop of the relationship between information and capitalism’s developmental processes. Yeo’s critical analysis draws on in-depth discussions of essential issues like how the search engine evolved into a ubiquitous commercial service, it’s place in a global information business that is restructuring the information industry and our very social lives, who exactly designs and uses search technology, what kinds of workers labor behind the scenes, and the influence of geopolitics.

An incisive look at a pervasive presence in our lives, Behind the Search Box places the search engine industry’s rise and ongoing success within an original political economy of digital capitalism.

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Behind the Stars, More Stars
The Tagus/Disquiet Collection of New Luso-American Writing
Edited by Christopher Larkosh and Oona Patrick
Tagus Press, 2019
Presenting experimental and boundary-breaking prose from women, people of color, and LGBTQ writers, Behind the Stars, More Stars imagines a more diverse and inclusive Luso-American and Portuguese-American literary scene, which has traditionally been dominated by male voices. Since its first "Writing the Luso Experience" workshops were held in 2011, Dzanc Books's Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon has aimed to break silences within today's Luso-American communities. Disquiet faculty Katherine Vaz and Frank X. Gaspar appear alongside up-and-coming writers from the workshops, such as Traci Brimhall, Megan Fernandes, Hugo Dos Santos, and previously unpublished women writers.
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Behind the Times
Inside the New New York Times
Edwin Diamond
University of Chicago Press, 1995
An incisive examination of the world's most respected paper, Behind the Times tells the story of changing Timesian values and of a new era for the paper—a tale of editorial struggles, star columnists and critics, institutional self-importance, and the political and cultural favorites of the Times' owners and editors. Taking the reader inside the Times' newsrooms and executive offices, Diamond offers an expert, insider's appraisal of how the Times and its editors continue to shape coverage of major public events for over one million readers. Diamond goes behind the scenes to recount the paper's recent and much heralded plan to win larger audiences and hold on to its dominant position in the new media landscape of celebrity journalism and hundred-channel television.

"Edwin Diamond's Behind the Times sets the Paper of Record straight—a fascinating look at the people and policies, the dissension and debate behind the seemingly serene masthead of the New York Times. No newsroom is a Garden of Eden, and only the rare reporter wears a halo: the Times, not surprisingly, is an imperfect place. But Edwin Diamond is careful to note the triumph as well as the turmoil at this great American newspaper. The result is a window on the changing world of journalism today."—Dan Rather

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Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties
An Indian Declaration of Independence
By Vine Deloria, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 1985

Originally published in 1974, just as the Wounded Knee occupation was coming to an end, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties raises disturbing questions about the status of American Indians within the American and international political landscapes. Analyzing the history of Indian treaty relations with the United States, Vine Deloria presents population and land ownership information to support his argument that many Indian tribes have more impressive landholdings than some small members of the United Nations. Yet American Indians are not even accorded status within the UN's trust territories recognition process.

A 2000 study published by the Annual Survey of International and Comparative Law recommends that the United Nations offer membership to the Iroquois, Cherokee, Navajo, and other Indian tribes. Ironically, the study also recommends that smaller tribes band together to form a confederation to seek membership—a suggestion nearly identical to the one the United States made to the Delaware Indians in 1778—and that a presidential commission explore ways to move beyond the Doctrine of Discovery, under which European nations justified their confiscation of Indian lands. Many of these ideas appear here in this book, which predates the 2000 study by twenty-six years. Thus, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties anticipates recent events as history comes full circle, making the book imperative reading for anyone wishing to understand the background of the movement of American Indians onto the world political stage.

In the quarter century since this book was written, Indian nations have taken great strides in demonstrating their claims to recognized nationhood. Together with Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations, by Deloria and David E. Wilkins, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties highlights the historical events that helped bring these changes to fruition. At the conclusion of Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, Deloria states: "The recommendations made in the Twenty Points and the justification for such a change as articulated in the book may well come to pass in our lifetime." Now we are seeing his statement come true.

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Behind the Veil in Arabia
Women in Oman
Unni Wikan
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Through photographs and detailed case histories, Unni Wikan explores the strict segregation of women, the wearing of the burqa mask, the elaborate nuptial rituals, and the graceful quality of Oman's social relations.

"Wikan does provide insights into the real position of these secluded and segregated women. . . . All this is interesting and valuable."—Ahdaf Soueif, Times Literary Supplement

"The book is detailed, insightful, and . . . engrossing. Anyone interested in the day-to-day triumphs and sorrows of women who live 'behind the veil' will want to read this account."—Arab Book World

"Wikan, a fine ethnographer, has an eye for everything that is distinctive about the culture and . . . builds up a wholly convincing picture. Above all, there is a sustained attempt to penetrate the inner lives of these strangely serene people."—Frank H. Stewart, Wilson Quarterly

"This book will certainly be of interest to all scholars concerned with sexual identity in the Islamic world."—Henry Munson, American Anthropologist
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