Heart disease, including coronary artery disease (CAD) and valvular heart disease (VHD), is the leading cause of mortality and morbidity in the world. Early diagnosis is important to prevent further development of the disease. Whilst standard diagnosis methods can be highly costly and invasive, by analysing heart murmur sounds via a phonocardiogram (PCG), patterns in the heart sound characteristics can be readily detected. The intensity, timing, and duration of the heart's sounds can correspond to murmurs, valvular issues, or congenital heart defects. Sounds are recorded using electronic stethoscopes to detect abnormalities not audible to the human ear. This technology is unique in its ability to be deployed in remote and underserved areas to aid in the timely diagnosis of heart diseases.

Multicore technology has brought about the reexamination of traditional power system electromagnetic transient simulation methods. The technological penetration of this advancement in power system simulation is not noticeable, but its demand is growing in importance in anticipation of the many-core shift. The availability of this technology in personal computers has orchestrated the redesign of simulation approaches throughout the software industry - and in particular, the parallelization of power system simulation.

This collection offers a wide variety of fascinating studies that consider multicultural aspects among deaf people worldwide. Mala Kleinfeld and Noni Warner investigate variation in the use of gay, lesbian, and bisexual signs in the Deaf community; Jan Branson, Don Miller, and I Gede Marsaja, assisted by I Wayan Negara, profile a deaf village in Bali, Indonesia in which hearing people are fluent in both sign and spoken languages. Alejandro Oviedo in Venezuela comments on bilingual deaf education in Venezuela, and Sara Schley outlines the sociolinguistic and educational implications of comparing ASL and English word definitions.

       Susan Mather discusses initiation in visually constructed dialogue from reading books with 3- to 8-year-old students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Pietro Celo offers insights on the interrogative in Italian Sign Language, and Julie Wilson examines narrative structure in American Sign Language ASL) through her analysis of “the tobacco story.” Rhonda Jacobs completes this significant, wide-ranging volume with her research on second language learning, as she presents the case for ASL as a truly foreign language by posing the question, “Just how hard is it to learn ASL?”

Catherine Horel has undertaken a comparative analysis of the societal, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the last decades of the Habsburg Monarchy as represented in twelve cities: Arad, Bratislava, Brno, Chernivtsi, Lviv, Oradea, Rijeka, Sarajevo, Subotica, Timișoara, Trieste, and Zagreb. By purposely selecting these cities, the author aims to counter the disproportionate attention that the largest cities in the empire receive.

With a focus on the aspects of everyday life faced by the city inhabitants (associations, schools, economy, and municipal politics) the book avoids any idealization of the monarchy as a paradise of peaceful multiculturalism, and also avoids exaggerating conflicts. The author claims that the world of the Habsburg cities was a dynamic space where many models coexisted and created vitality, emulation, and conflict. Modernization brought about the dissolution of old structures, but also mobility, the progress of education, the explosion of associative life, and constantly growing cultural offerings.

Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle is the first comprehensive look at comic books by and about race and ethnicity. The thirteen essays tease out for the general reader the nuances of how such multicultural comics skillfully combine visual and verbal elements to tell richly compelling stories that gravitate around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality within and outside the U.S. comic book industry. Among the explorations of mainstream and independent comic books are discussions of the work of Adrian Tomine, Grant Morrison, and Jessica Abel as well as Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's The Tomb of Dracula; Native American Anishinaabe-related comics; mixed-media forms such as Kerry James Marshall's comic-book/community performance; DJ Spooky's visual remix of classic film; the role of comics in India; and race in the early Underground Comix movement. The collection includes a "one-stop shop" for multicultural comic book resources, such as archives, websites, and scholarly books. Each of the essays shows in a systematic, clear, and precise way how multicultural comic books work in and of themselves and also how they are interconnected with a worldwide tradition of comic-book storytelling.

In his latest iconoclastic work, Douglas Brode—the only academic author/scholar who dares to defend Disney entertainment—argues that "Uncle Walt's" output of films, television shows, theme parks, and spin-off items promoted diversity decades before such a concept gained popular currency in the 1990s. Fully understood, It's a Small World—one of the most popular attractions at the Disney theme parks—encapsulates Disney's prophetic vision of an appealingly varied world, each race respecting the uniqueness of all the others while simultaneously celebrating a common human core. In this pioneering volume, Brode makes a compelling case that Disney's consistently positive presentation of "difference"—whether it be race, gender, sexual orientation, ideology, or spirituality—provided the key paradigm for an eventual emergence of multiculturalism in our society.

Using examples from dozens of films and TV programs, Brode demonstrates that Disney entertainment has consistently portrayed Native Americans, African Americans, women, gays, individual acceptance of one's sexual orientation, and alternatives to Judeo-Christian religious values in a highly positive light. Assuming a contrarian stance, Brode refutes the overwhelming body of "serious" criticism that dismisses Disney entertainment as racist and sexist. Instead, he reveals through close textual analysis how Disney introduced audiences to such politically correct principles as mainstream feminism. In so doing, Brode challenges the popular perception of Disney fare as a bland diet of programming that people around the world either uncritically deem acceptable for their children or angrily revile as reactionary pabulum for the masses.

Providing a long overdue and thoroughly detailed alternative, Brode makes a highly convincing argument that with an unwavering commitment to racial diversity and sexual difference, coupled with a vast global popularity, Disney entertainment enabled those successive generations of impressionable youth who experienced it to create today's aura of multiculturalism and our politically correct value system.

Magnetic field sensors have made significant advances over the past decade, and have found commercial importance in ubiquitous systems with navigation needs such as mobile phones - every mobile phone now contains a vectorial magnetic field sensor. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the underlying theory of magnetic-field microsensors, their construction, and current and future applications. Written by leading experts in the development of these sensors, this book is essential reading for academics and advanced students working in sensor design and application.

Synthetic aperture radar and inverse synthetic aperture radar (SAR/ISAR) images have been largely used for monitoring small to large areas and more specifically for target recognition/identification. However, the technology has limitations due to the use of classical monostatic, single channel, single frequency and single polarization systems. To overcome these limitations, solutions have been proposed that show the benefit of using multiple frequencies, spatial channels, polarisations and perspective, in one word multi-dimensional radar imaging systems when dealing with non-cooperative targets.

Increasing the performance of radar imaging systems will directly improve the effectiveness of automatic target recognition (ATR) systems. New ideas and solutions have been proposed in the recent NATO SET-250 Research Task Group (RTG) on multi-dimensional radar imaging, which initiated its activities in March 2017 and concluded them in October 2021. The goal of the SET-250 was to further develop systems and algorithms by using radar systems with extended dimensionality, such as multi-frequency, multi-polarisation and multi-view/multi-pass.

In recent years, a great deal of public attention has been focussed on multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO. This book offers students, practitioners and activists a critical guide to these and other major institutions - the Regional Development Banks and UNDP - that make up the multilateral development system. It analyses how they operate with respect to financing and lending, the various roles that they play, and related changes in their policy concerns - such as structural adjustment, sustainable development, and governance.

The emphasis is on politics within and also between multilateral institutions, analysing the relations – both competitive and collaborative – between, for example, the World Bank and UNDP. NGOs are also shown to be important actors, and the role they have played in recent years is critically assessed. The book concludes with some emerging trends: the ‘privatisation’ of the system, regionalisation, and ‘the politics of protest’.

Bøås and McNeill do not simply take the policies of multilateral institutions at face value, but ask how and why these policies came into existence. They seek to promote critical, but informed, engagement both with the member states of multilateral institutions and the institutions themselves.

This volume provides an analytical approach to most of the major items on the agenda of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations, which was convened in 1986 under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).The Uruguay Round negotiating agenda is ambitious in scope, consisting of such topics as barriers to trade, sectoral issues, and GATT rules, and a number of topics that had not been addressed in previous negotiations. The Multilateral Trading System begins with an introduction and overview of the issues, followed by two chapters that put the Uruguay Round in context and provide some historical perspective relating to previous GATT negotiations. The bulk of the volume consists of twelve analytical chapters that address many of the central issues, including tariffs and nontariff barriers; dumping; safeguards; agriculture; services; trade-related intellectual property rights; and trade-related investment measures. The concluding chapters deal with options for change, focusing on trade-offs, coalitions, and national interests and on suggestions for the design of a new constitution to govern the global trading system.The Multilateral Trading System deals with issues of central importance in the global trading system. It will be of particular interest to specialists in international trade and staff economists in national and international agencies. Specialists and students in political science, law, and business administration will also find much that is useful.

Multilingual Writing in Entanglement offers deep, behind-the-scenes insight into multilingual writing processes through ethnographically constructed case studies of two Chinese international students navigating first-year writing assignments. Drawing on fungi studies to develop ecology-informed metaphors, Xiqiao Wang traces how these students’ writing unfolds alongside multilingual living, revealing the thickets of relationships with both human participants (peers, teachers, writing consultants) and nonhuman elements (trees, rivers, digital texts, writing technologies) that create opportunities for negotiating across differences.

This longitudinal qualitative study follows Morgan and Leo through their undergraduate careers, collecting rich ethnographic data across private, academic, and digital spaces. The resulting theoretical framework conceptualizes multilingual writing as simultaneously strategic, agentive, creative, diffused, contingent, and messy—a phenomenon shaped by dynamic interplay between ephemeral encounters and established practices. Employing chronotopic figuring as a methodological tool, Wang illuminates aspects of multilingual writing often elided in research: fleeting encounters that energize composition, reciprocal relationships that distribute writing labor, unexpected detours that redirect the writing process, and the layering of writing and identity practices across multiple historical trajectories. This approach moves beyond examining writing in isolated moments to trace how meaning emerges across languages, modes, and spacetimes.

Multilingual Writing in Entanglement offers crucial insights into how international students strategically and improvisationally reconfigure their semiotic and rhetorical repertoires to write multilingual lives into meaning. This work is influential for scholars and educators in composition, literacy studies, multilingual education, ESL, and linguistics.

Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer explores transfer across various contexts of multimodal composing, extending the early conversations connecting multimodality to writing. Contributors address how writing transfer theories intersect with multimodal composing and present methods for facilitating transfer across modes and media, offering insight into how writers can learn to compose when they encounter familiar modes in new contexts.
 
Over the past two decades the concepts of multimodal composing and writing transfer have grown and reshaped the nature of writing studies, but rarely have the ways in which these areas overlap been studied. This collection shows how this shift in writing studies has been mutually informative, covering a wider range of contexts for multimodality and writing transfer than just in first-year composition courses. It places composition teaching practices and multimodal research in conversation with learning transfer theory to provide an in-depth examination of how they influence one another.
 
Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer develops these intersections to connect multimodal composition and writing practices across a wide array of fields and contexts. Scholars across disciplines, postsecondary writing teachers, writing program administrators, writing center directors, and graduate students will find this collection indispensable.
 

Multimodal Transfer Pedagogy provides practical methods and materials for composition teachers and directors to facilitate multimodal transfer. This rich collection of resources presents new ways of incorporating digital texts, exploring modes of meaning beyond traditional print and encouraging students to think about rhetorical approaches to meaning making.

Together with its online companion materials, the book delivers a distinctive synthesis of multimodal composing practices, writing transfer research, and theory to provide clear, actionable guidance to teachers and directors to apply multimodal composition pedagogy effectively. Twenty-three chapters cover multimodal transfer pedagogy—including social media, composing with AI, visual rhetoric and design, public advocacy, tabletop games, podcasting, and more.

Multimodal Transfer Pedagogy is built from contextualized pedagogical approaches and course materials—syllabi, assignments, assessment documents—that specifically direct pedagogical application toward multimodal transfer in a range of contexts, from first-year writing to the science writing classroom and writing center. A natural follow-up to Multimodal Composition and Writing Transfer, the book introduces a unique practical-pedagogical model for implementing multimodal work in the classroom.

The politics of coalition -- the very heart of the political process in most European countries -- can be analyzed either theoretically or empirically. Multiparty Government aims to reconcile these approaches by placing the insights of contemporary theory within the real world context of coalition politics. Michael Laver and Norman Schofield do this by examining five basic themes: the identity and motivation of the actors in the coalition game; the eventual membership of the coalitions they form; their durability; the payoffs that are shared out by coalition members; and the impact of constitutional bargaining, behavioral, and historical constraints on the process of coalition bargaining. They illustrate their discussion of theory with a range of detailed case studies. Multiparty Government offers an accessible approach that bridges the gap between the "European politics" and "game theory" traditions of political science, and puts the systematic study of the politics of coalition on the broader political science map."Laver and Schofield's book is at the same time accessible, pithy, down-to-earth, insightful, and yes, even captivating. In its scope and quality, it has no rival in the literature of party coalitions . . . all students of political parties or legislative behavior should allow themselves the privilege of being educated and entertained by Laver and Schofield's fine book." --American Political Science Review

The electrification of the economy entails the development and optimization of efficient electrical machines. Permanent magnet machines use permanent magnets, rather than windings, for field excitation. They are more efficient than other electrical machine technologies for high-efficiency applications. Multiphase machines, as compared to 3-phase machines, have advantages including lower torque pulsation, higher power density, and better fault tolerance.

This book aims to map the diversity of meanings of gender equality across Europe and reflects on the contested concept of gender equality. In its exploration of the diverse meanings of gender equality it not only takes into account the existence of different visions of gender equality, and the way in which different political and theoretical debates crosscut these visions, but also reflects upon the geographical contexts in which visions and debates over gender equality are located. The contextual locations where these visions and debates take place include the European Union and member states such as Austria, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovenia, Greece, and Spain. In all of these settings, the different meanings of gender equality are explored comparatively in relation to the issues of family policies, domestic violence, and gender inequality in politics, while specific national contexts discuss the issues of prostitution (Austria, Slovenia), migration (the Netherlands), homosexual rights (Spain), and antidiscrimination (Hungary). The multiple meanings of gender equality are studied through Critical Frame Analysis, a methodology that builds on social movement theory and that was refined further with elements of gender and political theory within the context of the MAGEEQ research project

Multiple Modernities explores the cultural terrain of East Asia. Arguing that becoming modern happens differently in different places, the contributors examines popular culture—most notable cinema and television—to see how modernization, as both a response to the West and as a process that is unique in its own right in the region, operates on a mass level.Included in this collection are significant explorations of popular culture in East Asia, including Chinese new cinema and rock music, Korean cinema, Taiwanese television, as well as discussions of alternative arts in general.While each essay focuses on specific nations or cinemas, the collected effect of reading them is to offer a comprehensive, in-depth picture of how popular culture in East Asia operates to both generate and reflect the immense change this significant region of the world is undergoing.

Today, the field of architecture faces a reckoning. While there is no longer consensus on what defines an architectural work, theorists, historians, and practitioners are grappling with urgent issues—among them the impact of climate change, the dynamics of power and race in relation with the built environment, and the technological, practical, and ethical dimensions of architecture. As established practices, academic objectives, and professional expectations come under scrutiny, architecture is in search of new definitions, identities, and voices.

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s memos about literature in the twenty-first century, this volume—the second in a series— situates architecture within a broad framework, exploring its complex interactions with environmental, cultural, political, social, artistic, and technological forces. The editors’ objective is to spur conversation across the boundaries that divide architecture’s theorists and historians from practitioners. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Sanford Kwinter, Aleksandra Jaeschke, Jennifer Mack, Rahul Mehrotra, Charles Waldheim, Kristi Cheramie, Jesse Reiser, Julian Harake, Jenny E. Sabin, Charles Davis, Esra Akcan, and David Karmon.

Understanding the entanglement of language education with ethnicity and racialization

Who has the “right” to learn Mandarin Chinese? In Multiracial Mandarin, author David Shuang Song examines how matters of race and privilege shape US Mandarin language education and who has access to it. Through a two-year ethnographic study of two Bay Area high schools where diasporic and heritage speakers learn Mandarin alongside Black and Latinx students, Song advances a sociological and educational–linguistic inquiry into how language interacts with our understanding of identity and equity.

Comparing classroom activities in two public schools, Song investigates teachers who seek to make Mandarin accessible while detaching it from its cultural roots. As he explores the difficulties of limited resources, racial inequality, and pedagogical practices inherent in multiracial Mandarin instruction, Song shows how language education complicates how educators understand Asian American students and troubles conventional conversations around race and racial equity in schools.

Arguing that language practice and instruction must always be considered in relation to diaspora, ethnicity, and racialization, Multiracial Mandarin offers a frank analysis of the risks and benefits of teaching a diasporic language and asks if this practice ought to be replicated in more schools. As he applies innovative conceptual frameworks for talking about language among Asian Americans, Song’s timely and theoretically sophisticated analysis has wide-ranging implications for how students, teachers, and administrators approach essential questions around education, privilege, and language survival.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

In Multisituated Kaushik Sunder Rajan evaluates the promises and potentials of multisited ethnography with regard to contemporary debates around decolonizing anthropology and the university. He observes that at the current moment, anthropology is increasingly peopled by diasporic students and researchers, all of whom are accountable to multiple communities beyond the discipline. In this light, Sunder Rajan draws on his pedagogical experience and dialogues to reconceptualize ethnography as a multisituated practice of knowledge production, ethical interlocution, and political intervention. Such a multisituated ethnography responds to contemporary anthropology’s myriad commitments as it privileges attention to questions of scale, comparison, and the politics of ethnographic encounters. Foregrounding the conditions of possibility and difficulty for those doing and teaching ethnography in the twenty-first-century, Sunder Rajan gestures toward an ethos and praxis of ethnography that would open new forms of engagement and research.

This book is devoted to target detection in a class of radar systems referred to as passive multistatic radar. This system is of great interest in both civilian and military scenarios due to many advantages. First, this system is substantially smaller and less expensive compared to an active radar system. Second, the multistatic configuration improves its detection and classification capabilities. Finally, there are many signals available for passive sensing making them hard to avoid.

Covering people and events from 1854 to the present day, this definitive history of Multnomah County provides compelling details about public works triumphs and political scandals.

Since prehistoric times, Andean societies have been organized around the ayllu, a grouping of real or ceremonial kinspeople who share labor, resources, and ritual obligations. Many Andean scholars believe that the ayllu is as ancient as Andean culture itself, possibly dating back as far as 6000 B.C., and that it arose to alleviate the hardships of farming in the mountainous Andean environment.

In this boldly revisionist book, however, William Isbell persuasively argues that the ayllu developed during the latter half of the Early Intermediate Period (around A.D. 200) as a means of resistance to the process of state formation. Drawing on archaeological evidence, as well as records of Inca life taken from the chroniclers, Isbell asserts that prehistoric ayllus were organized around the veneration of deceased ancestors, whose mummified bodies were housed in open sepulchers, or challups, where they could be visited by descendants seeking approval and favors. By charting the temporal and spatial distribution of chullpa ruins, Isbell offers a convincing new explanation of where, when, and why the ayllu developed.

This publication presents fascinating new findings on ancient Romano-Egyptian funerary portraits preserved in international collections.

Once interred with mummified remains, nearly a thousand funerary portraits from Roman Egypt survive today in museums around the world, bringing viewers face-to-face with people who lived two thousand years ago. Until recently, few of these paintings had undergone in-depth study to determine by whom they were made and how.
 
An international collaboration known as APPEAR (Ancient Panel Paintings: Examination, Analysis, and Research) was launched in 2013 to promote the study of these objects and to gather scientific and historical findings into a shared database. The first phase of the project was marked with a two-day conference at the Getty Villa. Conservators, scientists, and curators presented new research on topics such as provenance and collecting, comparisons of works across institutions, and scientific studies of pigments, binders, and supports. The papers and posters from the conference are collected in this publication, which offers the most up-to-date information available about these fascinating remnants of the ancient world.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/mummyportraits/ and includes zoomable illustrations and graphs. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.

This open-access publication presents new research on ancient Romano-Egyptian mummy portraits, including examinations of artifacts never previously studied.

Nearly a thousand funerary portraits from Roman Egypt, once interred with mummified remains, survive in museums around the world. These fascinating paintings offer the unparalleled opportunity for viewers to come face-to-face with people who lived and died some two thousand years ago.

The international collaboration known as APPEAR (Ancient Panel Paintings: Examination, Analysis, and Research) was launched in 2013 to promote the study of these objects and gather research findings in a shared database. This second volume of Mummy Portraits of Roman Egypt compiles seventeen scholarly papers from the APPEAR conference hosted in October 2022 at the Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam. Conservators, scientists, and curators presented new research on topics such as technical imaging; nondestructive analytical techniques; provenance and collecting; treatment histories; connoisseurship and forgeries; comparisons of works across institutions; and scientific studies of woods, pigments, coatings, binders, and supports. This volume will be a valuable resource to conservators, scientists, curators, and collectors.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/mummy-portraits-2/ and includes zoomable illustrations and graphs. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.

In Mundus Imaginalis, Hamid Dabashi exposes the Eurocentric worldview underlying the concept of world literature and maps an alternative vision in a centerless, pluralist world. Drawing on comparisons to the Persian literary tradition, Dabashi shows how imperial pasts cast a long and distorting shadow on cultural presents. Imperial imaginations outlast empires themselves, leaving “phantom empires” that perpetuate particular geographies of the world and arbitrate the literary. The Eurocentric idea of world literature domesticates and provincializes alternative ideas and conceptions, casting them as national allegories precisely at a time when Europe itself has been exposed for its own provinciality. Drawing on the classical Persian notion of the “imaginal world,” or mundus imaginalis, Dabashi retrieves a metaphysical foregrounding of worldly literature, charting a trajectory of thinkers whose literary imagination does not align with political desires for conquest, calculation, and consumption. Mundus Imaginalis shows how this imaginal world which gives root to all aesthetic acts maps an entirely distinct world of creative imagination.

This is volume 45 issue 2-3 of Municipal Finance Journal. Municipal Finance Journal covers the full range of issues facing professionals who work in state and local finance and tax-exempt financing. In each quarterly issue, leading practitioners and researchers address the complicated interplay of legal, market, economic and political perspectives that affect public finance. MFJ brings you in-depth coverage of financing strategies for statutory authorities, health care institutions, private universities and other tax-exempt issuers and the latest research on contemporary municipal, county and state fiscal issues and the acquisition, allocation and management of financial resources in a competitive capital marketplace.

Rebecca Biron breaks new ground in this study of masculinity, violence, and the strategic construction of collective political identities in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. By engaging current sociological, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, Murder and Masculinity analyzes the cliche of proving virility through violence against women. Biron develops her argument through close readings of five works: Jorge Luis Borges's "La intrusa," Armonia Somer's "El despojo," Clarice Lispector's A Maca no Escuro, Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair, and Reinaldo Arenas's El Asalto. Although men murdering women is often interpreted as nothing more than machista misogyny, Biron argues that the five narratives addressed in this book show that healed masculinities are essential to the achievement of cultural identity and political autonomy in Latin America.

The introduction to this study deftly situates Biron's work in relation to previous theoretical arguments on the social and political dimensions of Latin American writing. The five subsequent chapters offer superb analyses of the individual texts. Like their male protagonists who experiment with the psychological and legal extremes of gender division, these narratives risk nonconformity to the laws of genre in their quest for liberation from violent social and literary conventions. In combining elements of detective stories, crime narratives, psychological case studies, and magical or grotesque realism, they offer metafictional commentary on a network of discourses that confuses images of masculinity, national identity, and political autonomy in postcolonial Latin America.

For more than 300 years Massachusetts executed men and women convicted of murder, but with a sharp eye on “due proceeding” and against the backdrop of popular ambivalence about the death penalty's morality, cruelty, efficacy, and constitutionality. In this authoritative book, Alan Rogers offers a comprehensive account of how the efforts of reformers and abolitionists and the Supreme Judicial Court's commitment to the rule of law ultimately converged to end the death penalty in Massachusetts.

In the seventeenth century, Governor John Winthrop and the Massachusetts General Court understood murder to be a sin and a threat to the colony's well-being, but the Puritans also drastically reduced the crimes for which death was the prescribed penalty and expanded a capital defendant's rights. Following the Revolution, Americans denounced the death penalty as “British and brutish” and the state's Supreme Judicial Court embraced its role as protector of the rights extended to all men by the Massachusetts Constitution. In the 1830s popular opposition nearly stopped the machinery of death and a vote in the Massachusetts House fell just short of abolishing capital punishment.

A post–Civil War effort extending civil rights to all men also stimulated significant changes in criminal procedure. A “monster petition” begging the governor to spare the life of a murderer convicted on slight circumstantial evidence and the grim prospect of executing nine Chinese men found guilty of murder fueled a passionate debate about the death penalty in the decade before World War I.

The trials and executions of Sacco and Vanzetti focused unwanted international and national attention on Massachusetts. This was a turning point. Sara Ehrmann took charge of the newly formed Massachusetts Council Against the Death Penalty, relentlessly lobbied the legislature, and convinced a string of governors not to sign death warrants. In the 1970s the focus shifted to the courts, and eventually, in 1980, the Supreme Judicial Court abolished the death penalty on the grounds that it violated the Massachusetts Constitution.

Murder in the bucolic town of Independence, Missouri, is not everyday news. Especially when it occurs in the temple owned by the Reorganized Mormons. Once again, philosophy instructor and amateur sleuth Toom Taggart becomes embroiled in a homicide investigation. In this second novel, Edwards re-acquaints readers with the likeable, curmudgeonly professor who shocks fellow Latter Day Saints by drinking coffee. By coincidence, Taggart is called to oversee the Church’s education department, just as the author himself was some years ago. This gives Taggart even more reason to explore the inner offices at Church headquarters—places and hushed conversations are not meant for outsiders—all of which the author describes with a wink and a nod.

    For more than eighty years, the famous unsolved murder of William Desmond Taylor, the legendary bisexual film director, has generated debate and controversy.  Now, best-selling author Charles Higham has solved the crime.  Higham uncovers the corruption and intrigue of Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties—and the film industry moguls’ complete domination of the city’s authorities.
    When it was discovered that a famous star of the day had probably killed Taylor, a massive cover-up began—from the removal of crucial evidence to the naming of innocent people as killers—which has continued until now to protect the truth.  Murder in Hollywood goes beyond the killing to unearth unknown details about the life of Taylor before his arrival in Hollywood, as well as the stories and histories buried by the crooked authorities and criminals involved the case. The author’s exclusive interviews with the culpable star, his unique possession of long-vanished police records, and the support of the present-day Los Angeles county coroner—who examined the evidence as if the murder had taken place now—have ensured a hair-raising thriller.
    Charles Higham successfully presents the most plausible and convincing solution yet to the mystery.  In the process he paints a vivid portrait of Hollywood in the 1920s—from its major stars to its bisexual subculture. The result is a compelling answer to a long-standing mystery and a fascinating study of a place, and an industry that, as today, let people reinvent themselves. Murder in Hollywood is more extraordinary than any crime of fiction and more exciting than any action adventure movie.

In March 1824 a group of angry and intoxicated settlers brutally murdered nine Indians camped along a tributary of Fall Creek. The carnage was recounted in lurid detail in the contemporary press, and the events that followed sparked a national sensation. Murder in Their Hearts: The Fall Creek Massacre tells that, although violence between settlers and Native Americans was not unusual during the early nineteenth century, in this particular incident the white men responsible for the murders were singled out and hunted down, brought to trial, convicted by a jury of their neighbors, and, for the first time under American law, sentenced to death and executed for the murder of Native Americans.

Margaret Klem and John Meierhofer were Bavarian immigrants who arrived in New Jersey in the 1850s, got married, and started a small farm in West Orange. When John returned from the Civil War, he was a changed man, neglecting his work and beating his wife. Margaret was left to manage the farm and endure the suspicion of neighbors, who gossiped about her alleged affairs. Then one day in 1879, John turned up dead with a bullet in the back of his head. Margaret and her farmhand, Dutch immigrant Frank Lammens, were accused of the crime, and both went to the gallows, making Margaret the last woman to be executed by the state of New Jersey. 
 
Was Margaret the calculating murderess and adulteress portrayed by the press? Or was she a battered wife pushed to the edge? Or was she, as she claimed to the end, innocent? Murder on the Mountain considers all sides of this fascinating and mysterious true crime story. In turn, it examines why this murder trial became front-page news, as it resonated with public discussions about capital punishment, mental health, anti-immigrant sentiment, domestic violence, and women’s independence. This is a gripping and thought-provoking study of a murder that shocked the nation.

In Murder on the Reservation, Ray B. Browne surveys the work of several of the best-known writers of crime fiction involving Indian characters and references virtually every book that qualifies as an Indian-related mystery. Browne believes that within the genre of crime fiction all people are equal, and the increasing role of Indian characters in criminal fiction proves what an important role this genre plays as a powerful democratizing force in American society. He endeavors to both analyze and evaluate the individual work of the authors, and at the same time, provide a commentary on the various attitudes towards race relations in the United States that each author presents. Some Indian fiction is intended to right the wrongs the authors feel have been leveled against Indians. Other authors use Indian lore and Indian locales as exotic elements and locations for the entertaining and commercially successful stories they want to write. Browne’s analysis includes authors and works of all backgrounds, with mysteries of first-class murder both on and off the reservation.

James Short Senior Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology

Far too many poor Black communities struggle with gun violence and homicide. The result has been the unnatural contortion of Black families and the inter-generational perpetuation of social chaos and untimely death. Young people are repeatedly ripped away from life by violence, while many men are locked away in prisons. In neighborhoods like those of Wilmington, Delaware, residents routinely face the pressures of violence, death, and incarceration. Murder Town, USA is thus a timely ethnography with an innovative structure: the authors helped organize fifteen residents formerly involved with the streets and/or the criminal justice system to document the relationship between structural opportunity and experiences with violence in Wilmington's Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods. 

Earlier scholars offered rich cultural analysis of violence in low-income Black communities, and yet this literature has mostly conceptualized violence through frameworks of personal responsibility or individual accountability. And even if acknowledging the pressure of structural inequality, most earlier researchers describe violence as the ultimate result of some moral failing, a propensity for crime, and the notion of helplessness. Instead, in Murder Town USA, Payne, Hitchens, and Chamber, along with their collaborative team of street ethnographers, instead offer a radical re-conceptualization of violence in low-income Black communities by describing the penchant for violence and involvement in crime overall to be a logical, "resilient" response to the perverse context of structural inequality.

Embarking on a unique study of Roman criminal law, Judy Gaughan has developed a novel understanding of the nature of social and political power dynamics in republican government. Revealing the significant relationship between political power and attitudes toward homicide in the Roman republic, Murder Was Not a Crime describes a legal system through which families (rather than the government) were given the power to mete out punishment for murder.

With implications that could modify the most fundamental beliefs about the Roman republic, Gaughan's research maintains that Roman criminal law did not contain a specific enactment against murder, although it had done so prior to the overthrow of the monarchy. While kings felt an imperative to hold monopoly over the power to kill, Gaughan argues, the republic phase ushered in a form of decentralized government that did not see itself as vulnerable to challenge by an act of murder. And the power possessed by individual families ensured that the government would not attain the responsibility for punishing homicidal violence.

Drawing on surviving Roman laws and literary sources, Murder Was Not a Crime also explores the dictator Sulla's "murder law," arguing that it lacked any government concept of murder and was instead simply a collection of earlier statutes repressing poisoning, arson, and the carrying of weapons. Reinterpreting a spectrum of scenarios, Gaughan makes new distinctions between the paternal head of household and his power over life and death, versus the power of consuls and praetors to command and kill.

A tense sociopolitical novel exploring power, violence, and morality in 1970s India.
 
The Murderer’s Mother takes readers to the late 1970s in the Indian state of West Bengal, where the Communist Party–led Left Front has just been voted into power.  It tells the story of Tapan, who has been installed as a gang leader by the most powerful man in the locality in order to kill “unwanted obstacles,” which he does, one after another. Tapan knows there is no other way he can earn a living, but at the same time, he is desperate to protect his family. He tries to stop petty crime and assaults on women, even as he protects his patron’s interests. Through the dissonance, he becomes both a feared and revered figure, but his patron’s game becomes clear: now the murderer, too, must be eliminated.

Examining revenge narratives as a feminist response to slavery and settler colonialism

From Octavia Butler’s Kindred to The Round House by Louise Erdrich, themes of retribution resound throughout the work of renowned Black and Indigenous women and queer authors. Revealing how the Black Power Movement and the American Indian Movement influenced literature from the 1960s onward, Murderous Feeling explores how these writers have employed revenge narratives as a response to white supremacy and colonialism.

Chad Benito Infante shows how, rather than using retributive violence to cultivate a heroic, masculine ideal, Black and Native women and queer writers use revenge as a way to raise philosophical questions about justice and the reclamation of power in the face of white supremacy. Pairing canonical texts—including work by James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Craig Womack, Toni Morrison, and others—he demonstrates how this uniquely queer and feminist literary tradition, the “grammar of interrogation,” allows for generative ambivalence and curiosity about the possibilities and failures of violence.

In highlighting these narratives’ potential to steer anticolonial efforts, Murderous Feeling reconceptualizes literary violence not as an individualized act of cleansing but as a tool for revolutionary inquiry.

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Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the most powerful media organisation in the world. Murdoch's commercial success is obvious, but less well understood is his successful pursuit of political goals, using News Corporation as his vehicle.

In Murdoch's Politics David McKnight tracks Murdoch's influence, from his support for Reagan and Thatcher, his deal with Tony Blair and attacks on Barack Obama. He examines the secretive corporate culture of News Corporation: its private political seminars for editors, its support for think tanks and its global campaigns on issues like Iraq and climate change.

Including analysis of the phone hacking crisis, possible bribery charges and Murdoch's appearance at the Leveson enquiry, this book is a highly topical study of one of the most influential and controversial figures of the modern age.