BiblioVault - Books about Toward

Law, Family, and Women

Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy

Thomas Kuehn

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Focusing on Florence, Thomas Kuehn demonstrates the formative
influence of law on Italian society during the Renaissance,
especially in the spheres of family and women. Kuehn's use
of legal sources along with letters, diaries, and
contemporary accounts allows him to present a compelling
image of the social processes that affected the shape and
function of the law.

The numerous law courts of Italian city-states
constantly devised and revised statutes. Kuehn traces the
permutations of these laws, then examines their use by
Florentines to arbitrate conflict and regulate social
behavior regarding such issues as kinship, marriage,
business, inheritance, illlegitimacy, and gender. Ranging
from one man's embittered denunciation of his father to
another's reaction to his kinsmen's rejection of him as
illegitimate, Law, Family, and Women provides
fascinating evidence of the tensions riddling family life in
Renaissance Florence. Kuehn shows how these same tensions,
often articulated in and through the law, affected women. He
examines the role of the mundualdus—a male legal guardian
for women—in Florence, the control of fathers over their
married daughters, and issues of inheritance by and through
women. An ambitious attempt to reformulate the agenda of
Renaissance social history, Kuehn's work will be of value to
both legal anthropologists and social historians.

Thomas Kuehn is professor of history at Clemson
University.

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Lenin Reloaded

Toward a Politics of Truth, sic vii

Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, eds.

Duke University Press, 2007

Lenin Reloaded is a rallying call by some of the world’s leading Marxist intellectuals for renewed attention to the significance of Vladimir Lenin. The volume’s editors explain that it was Lenin who made Karl Marx’s thought explicitly political, who extended it beyond the confines of Europe, who put it into practice. They contend that a focus on Lenin is urgently needed now, when global capitalism appears to be the only game in town, the liberal-democratic system seems to have been settled on as the optimal political organization of society, and it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than a modest change in the mode of production. Lenin retooled Marx’s thought for specific historical conditions in 1914, and Lenin Reloaded urges a reinvention of the revolutionary project for the present. Such a project would be Leninist in its commitment to action based on truth and its acceptance of the consequences that follow from action.

These essays, some of which are appearing in English for the first time, bring Lenin face-to-face with the problems of today, including war, imperialism, the imperative to build an intelligentsia of wage earners, the need to embrace the achievements of bourgeois society and modernity, and the widespread failure of social democracy. Lenin Reloaded demonstrates that truth and partisanship are not mutually exclusive as is often suggested. Quite the opposite—in the present, truth can be articulated only from a thoroughly partisan position.

Contributors. Kevin B. Anderson, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Sebastian Budgen, Alex Callinicos, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Stathis Kouvelakis, Georges Labica, Sylvain Lazarus, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lars T. Lih, Domenico Losurdo, Savas Michael-Matsas, Antonio Negri, Alan Shandro, Slavoj Žižek

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Literacy and Deaf Education

Toward a Global Understanding

Qiuying Wang

Gallaudet University Press, 2020

International perspectives about literacy and deaf students is an uncharted intellectual landscape. Much of the literacy research in deaf education is conducted in English-speaking countries—primarily the United States—but 90% of deaf children live outside the U.S. and learn various signed and spoken languages, as well as diverse writing systems. Many of these children face significant educational challenges. In order to improve the literacy outcomes of deaf students around the world, it is imperative to study how children are using their local signed and spoken languages along with Deaf culture to learn to read and write. This volume fills a void in the field by providing a global view of recent theoretical and applied research on literacy education for deaf learners.

Literacy and Deaf Education: Toward a Global Understanding is organized by region and country, with the first part discussing writing systems that use alphabetic scripts, and the second part focusing on countries that use non-alphabetic scripts. Some examples of the wide spectrum of topics covered include communication methodologies, curriculum, bilingual education, reading interventions, script diversity, and sociocultural development, including Deaf cultural developments. The contributors provide the results from literacy projects in fifteen countries and regions.

This volume aims to widen the knowledge base, familiarize others in the field with these initiatives, and improve global understandings and outcomes of literacy teaching and learning in deaf education from birth to high school.

Signed chapter summaries are available on the Gallaudet University Press YouTube channel.

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Location and Land Use

Toward a General Theory of Land Rent

William Alonso

Harvard University Press

The Lost Region

Toward a Revival of Midwestern History

Jon K. Lauck

University of Iowa Press, 2013

The American Midwest is an orphan among regions. In comparison to the South, the far West, and New England, its history has been sadly neglected. To spark more attention to their region, midwestern historians will need to explain the Midwest’s crucial roles in the development of the entire country: it helped spark the American Revolution and stabilized the young American republic by strengthening its economy and endowing it with an agricultural heartland; it played a critical role in the Union victory in the Civil War; it extended the republican institutions created by the American founders, and then its settler populism made those institutions more democratic; it weakened and decentered the cultural dominance of the urban East; and its bustling land markets deepened Americans’ embrace of capitalist institutions and attitudes.

In addition to outlining the centrality of the Midwest to crucial moments in American history, Jon K. Lauck resurrects the long-forgotten stories of the institutions founded by an earlier generation of midwestern historians, from state historical societies to the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. Their strong commitment to local and regional communities rooted their work in place and gave it an audience outside the academy. He also explores the works of these scholars, showing that they researched a broad range of themes and topics, often pioneering fields that remain vital today.

The Lost Region demonstrates the importance of the Midwest, the depth of historical work once written about the region, the continuing insights that can be gleaned from this body of knowledge, and the lessons that can be learned from some of its prominent historians, all with the intent of once again finding the forgotten center of the nation and developing a robust historiography of the Midwest.

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Loving Animals

Toward a New Animal Advocacy

Kathy Rudy

University of Minnesota Press, 2013

The contemporary animal rights movement encompasses a wide range of sometimes-competing agendas from vegetarianism to animal liberation. For people for whom pets are family members—animal lovers outside the fray—extremist positions in which all human–animal interaction is suspect often discourage involvement in the movement to end cruelty to other beings. In Loving Animals, Kathy Rudy argues that in order to achieve such goals as ending animal testing and factory farming, activists need to be better attuned to the profound emotional, even spiritual, attachment that many people have with the animals in their lives.

Offering an alternative to both the acceptance of animal exploitation and radical animal liberation, Rudy shows that a deeper understanding of the nature of our feelings for and about animals can redefine the human–animal relationship in a positive way. Through extended interviews with people whose lives are intertwined with animals, analysis of the cultural representation of animals, and engaging personal accounts, she explores five realms in which humans use animals: as pets, for food, in entertainment, in scientific research, and for clothing. In each case she presents new methods of animal advocacy to reach a more balanced and sustainable relationship association built on reciprocity and connection.

Using this intense emotional bond as her foundation, Rudy suggests that the nearly universal stories we tell of living with and loving animals will both broaden the support for animal advocacy and inspire the societal changes that will improve the lives of animals—and humans—everywhere.

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