In the revolutionary decade between 1979 and 1992, it would have been difficult to find three political systems as different as death-squad-dominated El Salvador, peaceful social-democratic Costa Rica, and revolutionary Sandinista Nicaragua. Yet when the fighting was finally ended by a peace plan initiated by Costa Rica's President Oscar Arias, all three had found a common destination in democracy and free markets. To explain this extraordinary turn of events is the task of this landmark book, which fuses political economy and cultural analysis.

Both the divergent political histories and their convergent outcome were shaped by a single commodity that has dominated these export economies from the nineteenth century to the present--coffee. Jeffery Paige shows that the crises of the 1980s had their roots in the economic and political crises of the 1930s, when the revolutionary left challenged the ruling coffee elites of all three countries. He interweaves and compares the history, economics, and class structures of the three countries, thus clarifying the course of recent struggles. The heart of the book is his conversations with sixty-two leaders of fifty-eight elite dynasties, who for the first time tell their own stories of the experience of Central American revolution.

Paige's analysis challenges not only Barrington Moore's influential theory of dictatorship and democracy but also contemporary approaches to "transitions to democracy." It also shows that a focus on either political economy or culture alone cannot account for the transformation of elite ideology, and that revolution in Central America is deeply rooted in the personal, familial, and class histories of the coffee elites.

Alexander Romanovich Luria, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, is best known for his pioneering work on the development of language and thought, mental retardation, and the cortical organization of higher mental processes. Virtually unnoticed has been his major contribution to the understanding of cultural differences in thinking.

In the early 1930s young Luria set out with a group of Russian psychologists for the steppes of central Asia. Their mission: to study the impact of the socialist revolution on an ancient Islamic cotton-growing culture and, no less, to establish guidelines for a viable Marxist psychology. Lev Vygotsky, Luria's great teacher and friend, was convinced that variations in the mental development of children must be understood as a process including historically determined cultural factors. Guided by this conviction, Luria and his colleagues studied perception, abstraction, reasoning, and imagination among several remote groups of Uzbeks and Kirghiz—from cloistered illiterate women to slightly educated new friends of the central government.

The original hypothesis was abundantly supported by the data: the very structure of the human cognitive process differs according to the ways in which social groups live out their various realities. People whose lives are dominated by concrete, practical activities have a different method of thinking from people whose lives require abstract, verbal, and theoretical approaches to reality.

For Luria the legitimacy of treating human consciousness as a product of social history legitimized the Marxian dialectic of social development. For psychology in general, the research in Uzbekistan, its rich collection of data and the penetrating observations Luria drew from it, have cast new light on the workings of cognitive activity. The parallels between individual and social development are still being explored by researchers today. Beyond its historical and theoretical significance, this book represents a revolution in method. Much as Piaget introduced the clinical method into the study of children's mental activities, Luria pioneered his own version of the clinical technique for use in cross-cultural work. Had this text been available, the recent history of cognitive psychology and of anthropological study might well have been very different. As it is, we are only now catching up with Luria's procedures.

“This is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences… Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language.

Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us.

As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, our understanding of the cognition of literature was transformed by scientific discoveries, such as the mirror neuron system and its role in empathy. Addressing questions such as why we care so deeply about fictional characters, what brain activities are sparked when we read literature, and how literary works and scholarship can inform the cognitive sciences, this book surveys the exciting recent developments in the field of cognitive literary studies and includes contributions from leading scholars in both the humanities and the sciences.

Beginning with an overview of the evolution of literary studies, the editors trace the recent shift from poststructuralism and its relativism to a growing interdisciplinary interest in the empirical realm of neuroscience. In illuminating essays that examine the cognitive processes at work when we experience fictional worlds, with findings on the brain’s creativity sites, this collection also explores the impact of literature on self and society, ending with a discussion on the present and future of the psychology of fiction. Contributors include Literature and the Brain author Norman N. Holland, on the neuroscience of metafiction reflected in Don Quixote; clinical psychologist Aaron Mishara on the neurology of self in the hypnagogic (between waking and sleeping) state and its manifestations in Kafka’s stories; and literary scholar Brad Sullivan’s exploration of Romantic poetry as a didactic tool, applying David Hartley’s eighteenth-century theories of sensory experience.

People differ in their cognitive styles—their ways of getting and using information to solve problems and make decisions. Alfred G. Smith and his associates studied these differences in a selected group of over 800 students at a score of law schools throughout the United States. Two major cognitive styles were identified: that of the monopath, who follows a single route of established principles and procedures, and that of the polypath, who takes many routes, as circumstances suggest.

A battery of both original and standard tests was administered to both law students and their professors to investigate differences in cognitive style and their relationships to self-image, anxiety, and academic achievement. This also revealed differences in prevailing styles at different schools.

The results will be of special interest to readers concerned with legal education, to psychologists, and to behavioral scientists. The research format developed here will serve equally well for raising significant questions about the professions of medicine, education, social work, and others in which cognitive and communication styles play a central role in determining outcomes.

Sardis, capital city of the Lydian and Persian kings, stronghold of the Seleukid kings, metropolis of Roman Asia, and episcopal see in the Byzantine period, has been the focus of archaeological research since the early 1900s. This monograph focuses on the over 8,000 coins minted in the Lydian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods that were excavated between 1973 and 2013 in the Harvard-Cornell Expedition.

The book places coins within eastern Mediterranean historical, cultural, and economic contexts, in order to better understand the monetized economy of Sardis. It adds important archaeological context to shed light on the uses of coins and the nature of the deposits, with attention paid to the problems of monetary circulation and chronological development of the deposits, especially in the Late Roman period. Statistical analyses, including a new method of analyzing the deposits, help define the nature and chronological horizons of the strata. A catalog of the coins concludes the main body of the study, followed by appendices on countermarks, monograms, and statistical analyses.

Framed by the decline of the Heian aristocracy in the late 1100s and the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s, Japan’s medieval era was a chaotic period of diffuse political power and frequent military strife. This instability prevented central authorities from regulating trade, issuing currency, enforcing contracts, or guaranteeing property rights. But the lack of a strong central government did not inhibit economic growth. Rather, it created opportunities for a wider spectrum of society to participate in trade, markets, and monetization.

Peripheral elites—including merchants, warriors, rural estate managers, and religious leaders—devised new ways to circumvent older forms of exchange by importing Chinese currency, trading in local markets, and building an effective system of long-distance money remittance. Over time, the central government recognized the futility of trying to stifle these developments, and by the sixteenth century it asserted greater control over monetary matters throughout the realm.

Drawing upon diaries, tax ledgers, temple records, and government decrees, Ethan Isaac Segal chronicles how the circulation of copper currency and the expansion of trade led to the start of a market-centered economy and laid the groundwork for Japan’s transformation into an early modern society.

Created in 1934, the Coit Tower murals were sponsored by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the first of the New Deal art programs. Twenty-five master artists and their assistants worked there, most of them in buon fresco, Nearly all of them drew upon the palette and style of Diego Rivera. The project boosted the careers of Victor Arnautoff, Lucien Labaudt, Bernard Zakheim, and others, but Communist symbols in a few murals sparked the first of many national controversies over New Deal art.

Sixty full-color photographs illustrate Robert Cherny’s history of the murals from their conception and completion through their evolution into a beloved San Francisco landmark. Cherny traces and critiques the treatment of the murals by art critics and historians. He also probes the legacies of Coit Tower and the PWAP before surveying San Francisco’s recent controversies over New Deal murals.

An engaging account of an artistic landmark, The Coit Tower Murals tells the full story behind a public art masterpiece.

All histories of Hollywood are wrong. Why? Two words: Colonel Selig. This early pioneer laid the foundation for the movie industry that we know today. Active from 1896 to 1938, William N. Selig was responsible for an amazing series of firsts, including the first two-reel narrative film and the first two-hour narrative feature made in America; the first American movie serial with cliffhanger endings; the first westerns filmed in the West with real cowboys and Indians; the creation of the jungle-adventure genre; the first horror film in America; the first successful American newsreel (made in partnership with William Randolph Hearst); and the first permanent film studio in Los Angeles. Selig was also among the first to cultivate extensive international exhibition of American films, which created a worldwide audience and contributed to American domination of the medium.

In this book, Andrew Erish delves into the virtually untouched Selig archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library to tell the fascinating story of this unjustly forgotten film pioneer. He traces Selig’s career from his early work as a traveling magician in the Midwest, to his founding of the first movie studio in Los Angeles in 1909, to his landmark series of innovations that still influence the film industry. As Erish recounts the many accomplishments of the man who first recognized that Southern California is the perfect place for moviemaking, he convincingly demonstrates that while others have been credited with inventing Hollywood, Colonel Selig is actually the one who most deserves that honor.

Winner of a 2002 American Book Award
Winner of the 2002 Colorado Book Award in Poetry

"The natural voice at work in the poetry sings of one human life as if it were our own. I loved listening."
—Rita Kiefer, author of Nesting Doll

"This just may be one of the best books of poetry I have ever read. . . . This is the kind of writing that give poetry a good name."
—Mike Nobles, Tulsa World

"Abeyta's poetry amazingly captures this struggle with poems that are simultaneously tortured and thankful, celebratory and melancholy, earthly and ethereal. . . . Poet Abeyta beautifully captures the hardships of living in rural Colorado."
—Blue Sky Quarterly

"Abeyta writes about family, friends, and famous (and infamous) locals. His approach is intimate and daring while avoiding the self-absorbed, coffee-house clichés we fear. Yes, death plays a role in the connection of community and the land, but these poems are sly rather than dark, modulated rather than graphic, sweet rather than maudlin."
—Wayne Sheldrake, Colorado Central Magazine

As the old adage goes, "if you can't say it in a few pages, you won't in a hundred." The selections in Cold Flashes—very short prose and black-and-white photographs—embody perfectly this transparency, thrift, and restraint. Found here are highly polished micro-narratives, both fiction and nonfiction, and a series of eloquent and artistic halftones that capture their sizeable subjects in a nutshell. By minimizing the exposition, the selections stimulate the imagination to reflect on the rich diversity of people and places that make up Alaska. To be savored piecemeal at coffee shops, on the bus, or while waiting in line, the images and text in Cold Flashes will resonate with both the reader and each other, fusing into something profound yet elusive.

After World War II the United States faced two preeminent challenges: how to administer its responsibilities abroad as the world’s strongest power, and how to manage the rising movement at home for racial justice and civil rights. The effort to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War, a conflict that emphasized the American commitment to freedom. The absence of that freedom for nonwhite American citizens confronted the nation’s leaders with an embarrassing contradiction.

Racial discrimination after 1945 was a foreign as well as a domestic problem. World War II opened the door to both the U.S. civil rights movement and the struggle of Asians and Africans abroad for independence from colonial rule. America’s closest allies against the Soviet Union, however, were colonial powers whose interests had to be balanced against those of the emerging independent Third World in a multiracial, anticommunist alliance. At the same time, U.S. racial reform was essential to preserve the domestic consensus needed to sustain the Cold War struggle.

The Cold War and the Color Line is the first comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of global white supremacy. Thomas Borstelmann pays close attention to the two Souths—Southern Africa and the American South—as the primary sites of white authority’s last stand. He reveals America’s efforts to contain the racial polarization that threatened to unravel the anticommunist western alliance. In so doing, he recasts the history of American race relations in its true international context, one that is meaningful and relevant for our own era of globalization.

The end of World War II did not mean the arrival of peace. The major powers faced social upheaval at home, while anticolonial wars erupted around the world. American–Soviet relations grew chilly, but the meaning of the rivalry remained disputable. Cold War Crucible reveals the Korean War as the catalyst for a new postwar order. The conflict led people to believe in the Cold War as a dangerous reality, a belief that would define the fears of two generations.

In the international arena, North Korea’s aggression was widely interpreted as the beginning of World War III. At the domestic level, the conflict generated a wartime logic that created dividing lines between “us” and “them,” precipitating waves of social purges to stifle dissent. The United States allowed McCarthyism to take root; Britain launched anti-labor initiatives; Japan conducted its Red Purge; and China cracked down on counterrevolutionaries. These attempts to restore domestic tranquility were not a product of the Cold War, Masuda Hajimu shows, but driving forces in creating a mindset for it. Alarmed by the idea of enemies from within and faced with the notion of a bipolar conflict that could quickly go from chilly to nuclear, ordinary people and policymakers created a fantasy of a Cold War world in which global and domestic order was paramount.

In discovering how policymaking and popular opinion combined to establish and propagate the new postwar reality, Cold War Crucible offers a history that reorients our understanding of what the Cold War really was.

A fresh reappraisal of Japan’s relationship with the United States, which reveals how the Cold War shaped Japan and transformed America’s understanding of what it takes to establish a postwar democracy.

Is American foreign policy a reflection of a desire to promote democracy, or is it motivated by America’s economic interests and imperial dreams? Jennifer Miller argues that democratic ideals were indeed crucial in the early days of the U.S.–Japanese relationship, but not in the way most defenders claim. American leaders believed that building a peaceful, stable, and democratic Japan after a devastating war required much more than elections or a new constitution. Instead, they saw democracy as a psychological and even spiritual “state of mind,” a vigilant society perpetually mobilized against the false promises of fascist and communist anti-democratic forces. These ideas inspired an unprecedented crusade to help the Japanese achieve the individualistic and rational qualities deemed necessary for democracy.

These American ambitions confronted vigorous Japanese resistance. Activists mobilized against U.S. policy, surrounding U.S. military bases and staging protests to argue that a true democracy must be accountable to the Japanese people. In the face of these protests, leaders from both the United States and Japan maintained their commitment to building a psychologically “healthy” democracy. During the occupation, American policymakers identified elections and education as the wellsprings of a new consciousness, but as the extent of Japan’s remarkable economic recovery became clear, they increasingly placed prosperity at the core of a revised vision for their new ally’s future. Cold War Democracy reveals how these ideas and conflicts informed American policies, including the decision to rebuild the Japanese military and distribute U.S. economic assistance and development throughout Asia.

Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, Toby C. Rider chronicles how the U.S. government used the Olympics to promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early phase of the Cold War. Rider shows how the government, though constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly funded émigré organizations bent on liberating their home countries from Soviet control. At the same time, the United States utilized Olympic host cities as launching pads for hyping the American economic and political system. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the government attempted clandestine manipulation of the International Olympic Committee. Rider also details the campaigns that sent propaganda materials around the globe as the United States mobilized culture in general, and sports in particular, to fight the communist threat.

Deeply researched and boldly argued, Cold War Games recovers an essential chapter in Olympic and postwar history.

Nicholas J. Schlosser draws on broadcast transcripts, internal memoranda, listener letters, and surveys by the U.S. Information Agency to profile RIAS. Its mission: to undermine the German Democratic Republic with propaganda that, ironically, gained in potency by obeying the rules of objective journalism. Throughout, Schlosser examines the friction inherent in such a contradictory project and propaganda's role in shaping political culture. He also portrays how RIAS's primarily German staff influenced its outlook and how the organization both competed against its rivals in the GDR and pushed communist officials to alter their methods in order to keep listeners.

From the occupation of Berlin through the airlift to the construction of the Berlin Wall, Cold War on the Airwaves offers an absorbing view of how public diplomacy played out at a flashpoint of East-West tension.

Cundill History Prize Finalist
Longman–History Today Prize Finalist
Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize

“Meticulous environmental-historical detective work.”
—Times Literary Supplement

When Europeans first arrived in North America, they faced a cold new world. The average global temperature had dropped to lows unseen in millennia. The effects of this climactic upheaval were stark and unpredictable: blizzards and deep freezes, droughts and famines, winters in which everything froze, even the Rio Grande. A Cold Welcome tells the story of this crucial period, taking us from Europe’s earliest expeditions in unfamiliar landscapes to the perilous first winters in Quebec and Jamestown. As we confront our own uncertain future, it offers a powerful reminder of the unexpected risks of an unpredictable climate.

“A remarkable journey through the complex impacts of the Little Ice Age on Colonial North America…This beautifully written, important book leaves us in no doubt that we ignore the chronicle of past climate change at our peril. I found it hard to put down.”
—Brian Fagan, author of The Little Ice Age

“Deeply researched and exciting…His fresh account of the climatic forces shaping the colonization of North America differs significantly from long-standing interpretations of those early calamities.”
—New York Review of Books

In the heady days of the Cold War, when the Bomb loomed large in the ruminations of Washington’s wise men, policy intellectuals flocked to the home of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter to discuss deterrence and doomsday. The Cold World They Made takes a fresh look at the original power couple of strategic studies. Seeking to unravel the complex tapestry of the Wohlstetters’ world and worldview, Ron Robin reveals fascinating insights into an unlikely husband-and-wife pair who, at the height of the most dangerous military standoff in history, gained access to the deepest corridors of American power.

The author of such classic Cold War treatises as “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Albert Wohlstetter is remembered for advocating an aggressive brinksmanship that stood in stark contrast with what he saw as weak and indecisive policies of Soviet containment. Yet Albert’s ideas built crucially on insights gleaned from his wife. Robin makes a strong case for the Wohlstetters as a team of intellectual equals, showing how Roberta’s scholarship was foundational to what became known as the Wohlstetter Doctrine. Together at RAND Corporation, Albert and Roberta crafted a mesmerizing vision of the Soviet threat, theorizing ways for the United States to emerge victorious in a thermonuclear exchange.

Far from dwindling into irrelevance after the Cold War, the torch of the Wohlstetters’ intellectual legacy was kept alive by well-placed disciples in George W. Bush’s administration. Through their ideological heirs, the Wohlstetters’ signature combination of brilliance and hubris continues to shape American policies.

In A Cole Porter Companion, a parade of performers and scholars offers essays on little-known aspects of the master tunesmith's life and art. Here are Porter's days as a Yale wunderkind and his nights as the exemplar of louche living; the triumph of Kiss Me Kate and shocking failure of You Never Know; and his spinning rhythmic genius and a turkey dinner into "You're the Top" while cultural and economic forces take "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" in unforeseen directions. Other entries explore notes on ongoing Porter scholarship and delve into his formative works, performing career, and long-overlooked contributions to media as varied as film and ballet.

Prepared with the cooperation of the Porter archives, A Cole Porter Companion is an invaluable guide for the fans and scholars of this beloved American genius.

Collaborating to Manage captures the basic ideas and approaches to public management in an era where government must partner with external organizations as well as other agencies to work together to solve difficult public problems. In this primer, Robert Agranoff examines current and emergent approaches and techniques in intergovernmental grants and regulation management, purchase-of-service contracting, networking, public/nonprofit partnerships and other lateral arrangements in the context of the changing public agency. As he steers the reader through various ways of coping with such organizational richness, Agranoff offers a deeper look at public management in an era of shared public program responsibility within governance.

Geared toward professionals working with the new bureaucracy and for students who will pursue careers in the public or non-profit sectors, Collaborating to Manage is a student-friendly book that contains many examples of real-world practices, lessons from successful cases, and summaries of key principles for collaborative public management.

To continue doing business in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films that attacked the Nazis or condemned Germany's persecution of Jews. Ben Urwand reveals this bargain for the first time—a "collaboration" (Zusammenarbeit) that drew in a cast of characters ranging from notorious German political leaders such as Goebbels to Hollywood icons such as Louis B. Mayer.

At the center of Urwand's story is Hitler himself, who was obsessed with movies and recognized their power to shape public opinion. In December 1930, his Party rioted against the Berlin screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, which led to a chain of unfortunate events and decisions. Fearful of losing access to the German market, all of the Hollywood studios started making concessions to the German government, and when Hitler came to power in January 1933, the studios—many of which were headed by Jews—began dealing with his representatives directly.

Urwand shows that the arrangement remained in place through the 1930s, as Hollywood studios met regularly with the German consul in Los Angeles and changed or canceled movies according to his wishes. Paramount and Fox invested profits made from the German market in German newsreels, while MGM financed the production of German armaments. Painstakingly marshaling previously unexamined archival evidence, The Collaboration raises the curtain on a hidden episode in Hollywood—and American—history.

Studies of collaboration have changed how the history of World War II in Europe is written, but for China and Japan this aspect of wartime conduct has remained largely unacknowledged. In a bold new work, Timothy Brook breaks the silence surrounding the sensitive topic of wartime collaboration between the Chinese and their Japanese occupiers.

Japan's attack on Shanghai in August 1937 led to the occupation of the Yangtze Delta. In spite of the legendary violence of the assault, Chinese elites throughout the delta came forward to work with the conquerors. Using archives on both sides of the conflict, Brook reconstructs the process of collaboration from Shanghai to Nanking. Collaboration proved to be politically unstable and morally awkward for both sides, provoking tensions that undercut the authority of the occupation state and undermined Japan's long-term prospects for occupying China.

This groundbreaking study mirrors the more familiar stories of European collaboration with the Nazis, showing how the Chinese were deeply troubled by their unavoidable cooperation with the occupiers. The comparison provides a point of entry into the difficult but necessary discussion about this long-ignored aspect of the war in the Pacific.

Collaborative Archaeology brings together a diverse group of scholars and tribal cultural resource professionals to showcase how Indigenous knowledge is transforming archaeological practice. Edited by Chris Loendorf, this volume features twelve case studies that highlight the power of partnership between Native American communities and archaeologists. These collaborations not only enrich our understanding of the past but also affirm Indigenous cultural continuity. From the establishment of Tribal Historic Preservation Offices to tribally led research initiatives, the book illustrates how Native voices are reshaping the field.
 
This timely collection bridges disciplinary divides between archaeology, history, and traditional knowledge, challenging outdated narratives that separate “prehistory” from living Indigenous communities. Contributors demonstrate how ethical, community-based research can lead to more accurate and respectful interpretations of the past. Collaborative Archaeology is essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners committed to scientific understanding and cultural preservation.

Contributors
Nicole Armstrong-Best
Skylar Begay
Jennifer Bess
Hannah F. Chavez
Robert B. Ciaccio
Shannon Cowell
William H. Doelle
Karl A. Hoerig
Anabel Galindo
Barnaby V. Lewis
Chris Loendorf
Brian Medchill
Linda Morgan
Laurene G. Montero
Stephen E.  Nash
Eloise Pedro
Glen E. Rice
Teresa Rodrigues
Hoski Schaafsma
Thomas E. Sheridan
Katrina Soke
Lindsey Vogel-Teeter
Anastasia Walhovd
Kelly Washington
Reylynne Williams
M. Kyle Woodson
Aaron M. Wright