front cover of The Straight Line
The Straight Line
Writing on Poetry and Poets
Ronald Padgett
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The Straight Line brings together memoir, informal talks, autobiographical essays, unconventional book reviews, instructional pieces, imaginative speculations on the nature of reading, and poems about writing. What distinguishes these pieces is Ron Padgett's refreshing sense of humor and the changing, unexpected angles on his point of view. He pokes fun at the concept of "finding one's poetic voice," has a dream conversation with a Russian poet, talks to his typewriter, parodies Robert Frost, deconstructs the haiku, finds weird word lists in the dictionary, and extols the pleasures of mistakes in writing.
But along with the playful wit comes Padgett's serious fascination with how words work. Essays discuss such subjects as the otherness of languages; French poets and their relationship to Cubist painters; an afternoon with the poet Edwin Denby; a tribute to Ted Berrigan; twentieth-century modernism; and suggestions for using the computer to write poetry.
The book concludes with pieces that Padgett has written during his thirty years as a teacher of poetry. Essays explore the unexpected relationships between poetry and dance; the practical value of using "gimmicks" to inspire poetry writing; and some radical and entertaining ideas for innovative ways to read creatively.
Ron Padgett is Publications Director, Teachers and Writers Collaborative. His books include Albanian Diary, Creative Reading, and Old Faithful: 18 Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments.
[more]

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Science Fiction in Argentina
Technologies of the Text in a Material Multiverse
Joanna Page
University of Michigan Press, 2016
It has become something of a critical commonplace to claim that science fiction does not actually exist in Argentina. This book puts that claim to rest by identifying and analyzing a rich body of work that fits squarely in the genre. Joanna Page explores a range of texts stretching from 1875 to the present day and across a variety of media-literature, cinema, theatre, and comics-and studies the particular inflection many common discourses of science fiction (e.g., abuse of technology by authoritarian regimes, apocalyptic visions of environmental catastrophe) receive in the Argentine context. A central aim is to historicize these texts, showing how they register and rework the contexts of their production, particularly the hallmarks of modernity as a social and cultural force in Argentina. Another aim, held in tension with the first, is to respond to an important critique of historicism that unfolds in these texts. They frequently unpick the chronology of modernity, challenging the linear, universalizing models of development that underpin historicist accounts. They therefore demand a more nuanced set of readings that work to supplement, revise, and enrich the historicist perspective.
[more]

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Leading Questions
How Hegemony Affects the International Political Economy
Robert David Pahre
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Leadership has long been an important subject in the study of international economic relations. Many scholars give American leadership credit for strong economic growth in western Europe and Japan after World War II. Other scholars have accused leading nations of using their power to the detriment of foreign countries. For example, it is often argued that a failure of both British and American leadership was a cause of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In Leading Questions, Robert Pahre develops a series of formal models to determine under what conditions leadership will be beneficial or harmful for the international political economy. He begins with a simple model of collective action and then adds leadership, security concerns, cooperation, and multilateral regimes to this basic model. He tests each model against a different historical period between 1815 and 1967.
Pahre's findings challenge conventional wisdom on international leadership. He finds that a leading state harms others when it has many allies but is good for the international political economy when it lacks allies. Leaders are less likely to engage in international cooperation than are other states, but having a leader in the system makes cooperation among follower states more likely. Cooperation by others may cause the leader to join a system of multilateral cooperation.
Pahre presents the technical material in an accessible style. By challenging the conventional interpretations of political economy in several historical periods, Leading Questions will be of interest not only to political scientists but also to economists and historians.
Robert Pahre is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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A History of Earliest Italy
Massimo Pallottino
University of Michigan Press, 1991
A study of pre-Roman peoples from the Bronze Age to the unification of the Italian peninsula and Sicily by Rome
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Evading the Patronage Trap
Interest Representation in Mexico
Brian Palmer-Rubin
University of Michigan Press, 2022

Why have Latin American democracies proven unable to confront the structural inequalities that cripple their economies and stymie social mobility? Brian Palmer-Rubin contends that we may lay the blame on these countries’ systems of interest representation, which exhibit “biased pluralism,” a system in which the demands of organizations representing economic elites—especially large corporations—predominate. A more inclusive model of representation would not only require a more encompassing and empowered set of institutions to represent workers, but would also feature spaces for non-eliteproducers—such as farmers and small-business owners to have a say in sectoral economic policies.

With analysis drawing on over 100 interviews, an original survey, and official government data, this book focuses on such organizations and develops an account of biased pluralism in developing countries typified by the centrality of patronage—discretionarily allocated state benefits. Rather than serving as conduits for demand-making about development models, political parties and interest organizations often broker state subsidies or social programs, augmenting the short-term income of beneficiaries, but doing little to improve their long-term economic prospects. When organizations become diverted into patronage politics, the economic demands of the masses go unheard in the policies that most affect their lives, and along the way, their economic interests go unrepresented.

[more]

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Michigan Ferns and Lycophytes
A Guide to Species of the Great Lakes Region
Daniel D. Palmer
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Michigan’s ferns and lycophytes are among the state’s most fascinating plants. The species in these groups exhibit incredibly diverse life cycles and an amazing array of morphology. Some species such as the Bracken fern are widespread and aggressive, dominating forest understories throughout much of northern Michigan, while other species are exceedingly rare and adapted to life solely in harsh niche habitats where little else can grow.

Unlike the well-studied flowering plants and gymnosperms, Michigan’s ferns and lycophytes have long lacked a reliable, up-to-date guidebook, and this book fills that gap. Covering all 120 taxa found in the state, it features detailed keys, species descriptions, and range maps alongside precise illustrations. Readers learn about the etymology of species’ common and scientific names as well as interesting facts about their historic uses by humans and place within the Michigan ecosystem. The book also provides information on the challenging taxonomy of many ferns and lycophytes, with special attention given to the species likely to hybridize and those prone to misidentification. This is a must-have reference for anyone who wishes to learn about these important components of the Great Lakes flora.
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Launching Global Health
The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation
Steven Palmer
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"With a clear and engaging narrative that delves into complex and debatable issues and, at the same time, tells very entertaining stories, this book is a wonderful addition to the historiography of international health."
---Diego Armus, Swarthmore College

From the Rockefeller Foundation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. philanthropies have played a leading role in the evolution of international health. Launching Global Health examines one of the earliest of these initiatives abroad, the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Board. The flagship agency made its first call in British Guiana in 1914 to experiment with its new "American method" for the treatment of hookworm disease. Within months it was involved in ambitious hookworm programs in six Central American and Caribbean sites, its directors self-consciously choosing to test run the prototype for their global project in the nearest and clearest domain of American imperial influence. These efforts continued until 1930, when most of the International Health Board hookworm campaigns had evolved into public health projects of a different nature.

Launching Global Health is the first book to explore the inaugural Rockefeller Foundation campaigns in depth and to treat them as an ensemble---as a laboratory for discovering and testing the elements of a global health system for the twentieth century. Orienting the study according to the priorities and perspectives of the social and cultural history of medicine and marrying the results with social science and institutional approaches, Steven Palmer rediscovers elements and dynamics in the original history of global health that were either discarded or that have continued to operate beneath the radar of scholarship.

In particular, Palmer examines the extraordinary encounters that took place between the Rockefeller proselytizers of biomedicine and public health and the diverse populations whom they were attempting to help. Launching Global Health devotes special attention to the health narratives and practices of laboring people of different ethnicities and how they clashed and blended with the stories and rituals being promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation, ultimately showing the locally assembled health teams of microscopists, inspectors, and dispensers to have been active agents in the shaping of encounters between imperial and popular medicine.

Steven Palmer is Canada Research Chair in the History of International Health at the University of Windsor and author of From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800-1940.

Illustration: Lecture on hookworm disease on public building porch. Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Center.

A volume in the series Conversations in Medicine and Society.

[more]

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Getting Published in Academic Journals
Navigating the Publication Process
Brian Richard Paltridge
University of Michigan Press, 2016
The pressure on graduate students and new PhDs to publish their work continues to grow with writing and publishing considered an important measure of career success within the academy. There is, however, more to the process of getting published than those who are new to the process initially realize. The aim of this guide is to clarify the process and offer advice. Getting Published in Academic Journals is written for graduate students and newly graduated PhDs who want to publish their research in peer-reviewed academic journals.
                                                                                                   
Getting Published in Academic Journals draws on the experiences of the authors as editors of peer-reviewed journals, as teachers of writing-for-publication courses and workshops, as researchers of the scholarly publication process, as reviewers of  hundreds of articles, and as published authors.  
 
The book is written to be used in courses and workshops on publishing, as a supplement to the books in the revised and updated English in Today’s Research World (Swales & Feak) series, and as a stand-alone guide for academic writers working independently.
[more]

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Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan
The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chomei
Rajyashree Pandey
University of Michigan Press, 1998
This is the first monograph-length study in English of Kamo no Chōmei, one of the most important literary figures of medieval Japan. Drawing upon a wide range of writings in a variety of genres from the Heian and Kamakura periods, Pandey focuses on the terms kyōgen kigo (wild words and fancy phrases), shoji soku nehan (samsara is nirvana), hōben (expedient means), and suki (single-minded devotion to an art). She shows how these terms deployed by writers in an attempt to reconcile literary and artistic activities with a commitment to Buddhism. By locating Chōmei within this broad context, the book offers an original reading of his texts, while at the same time casting a light upon intellectual preoccupations that were central to the times.
Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan is an important contribution to a growing body of work that challenges the rigid distinction between the religious and literary—a distinction that would have made little sense to medieval writers, many of whom were poets as well as priests—and sheds light on the particular ways in which a religio-aesthetic tradition came to be articulated in medieval Japan. Through an examination of records left by Chōmei's contemporaries, the book also traces the life of Chōmei, particularly his activities as a court poet and the circumstances that led to his taking the tonsure.
[more]

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The Appearing Demos
Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement
Laikwan Pang
University of Michigan Press, 2020
As the waves of Occupy movements gradually recede, we soon forget the political hope and passions these events have offered. Instead, we are increasingly entrenched in the simplified dichotomies of Left and Right, us and them, hating others and victimizing oneself. Studying Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, which might be the largest Occupy movement in recent years, The Appearing Demos urges us to re-commit to democracy at a time when democracy is failing on many fronts and in different parts of the world.
 
The 79-day-long Hong Kong Umbrella Movement occupied major streets in the busiest parts of the city, creating tremendous inconvenience to this city famous for capitalist order and efficiency. It was also a peaceful collective effort of appearance, and it was as much a political event as a cultural one. The urge for expressing an independent cultural identity underlined both the Occupy movement and the remarkably rich cultural expressions it generated. While understanding the specificity of Hong Kong’s situations, The Appearing Demos also comments on some global predicaments we are facing in the midst of neoliberalism and populism. It directs our attention from state-based sovereignty to city-based democracy, and emphasizes the importance of participation and cohabitation. The book also examines how the ideas of Hannah Arendt are useful to those happenings much beyond the political circumstances that gave rise to her theorization. The book pays particular attention to the actual intersubjective experiences during the protest. These experiences are local, fragile, and sometimes inarticulable, therefore resisting rationality and debates, but they define the fullness of any individual, and they also make politics possible. Using the Umbrella Movement as an example, this book examines the “freed” political agents who constantly take others into consideration in order to guarantee the political realm as a place without coercion and discrimination. In doing so, Pang Laikwan demonstrates how politics means neither to rule nor to be ruled, and these movements should be defined by hope, not by goals.
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Latin Grammar
Dirk Panhuis
University of Michigan Press, 2006
In Latin Grammar, Dirk Panhuis has created an innovative reference that makes use of many of the advances that have taken place in linguistics during the last half century. Using a syntactic—instead of the traditional morphological—approach to syntax, Panhuis explains linguistic concepts clearly, thoroughly describing the structure of the sentence and its parts. For ease of use, Panhuis often presents the theory in well-organized tables and charts, and provides the reader with illustrative texts by Latin authors.
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Through clear structuring of language phenomena, Panhuis provides a reference that integrates traditional linguistic knowledge with linguistic innovation and didactic clarity. This concise reference, ideal for students and instructors of Latin in high schools and colleges, will supplant the out-dated grammars of Allen & Greenough and Hale & Buck.

Dirk Panhuis graduated in classical philology at the State University of Ghent, Belgium, in 1963 and obtained his PhD in linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1981. He has been assistant and academic secretary of the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique in Kananga (Democratic Republic of Congo) and a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan. He taught classical languages in high schools of the Flemish Community in and around Louvain (Belgium) until his retirement in 2002.


"Panhuis brings a very welcome linguistic orientation to the study of Latin, an approach not found in the older traditional grammars currently used at the college level. Among the features likely to prove most helpful for students is the presentation of information in clear and easily readable charts and grids, and the explanations accompanying the English translations, allowing students to see clearly how to render a Latin structure into English both literally and idiomatically."
Back Cover continued
—Deborah Ross, Department of Classical Studies, University of Michigan

"This innovative grammar incorporates current viewpoints of syntax and semantics, making it a unique tool, especially for the study of sentence structure."—Philip Baldi, Professor of Linguistics and Classics, Pennsylvania State University

"In his Latin Grammar, Panhuis artfully integrates traditional description and modern analysis. It will provide intermediate and advancing Latin students mature help in understanding Latin syntax and offers material on the dynamics of text which is unique for an introductory reference tool. Not to be overlooked is its value as a resource to those who teach Latin."
—Charles Elerick, Professor of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Texas at El Paso
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No Safe Spaces
Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater
Angela C. Pao
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"No Safe Spaces opens up a conversation beyond narrow polemics . . . Although cross-racial casting has been the topic of heated discussion, little sustained scholarship addresses both the historical precedents and theoretical dimensions. Pao illustrates the tensions and contradictions inherent not only in stage representations, but also in the performance of race in everyday life. A wonderful book whose potential readership goes well beyond theater and performance scholars."
---Josephine Lee, University of Minnesota

"Non-traditional casting, increasingly practiced in American theater, is both deeply connected to our country's racial self-image(s) and woefully under-theorized. Pao takes on the practice in its entirety to disentangle the various strands of this vitally important issue."
---Karen Shimakawa, New York University

No Safe Spaces looks at one of the most radical and enduring changes introduced during the Civil Rights era---multiracial and cross-racial casting practices in American theater. The move to cast Latino/a, African American, and Asian American actors in classic stage works by and about white Europeans and Americans is viewed as both social and political gesture and artistic innovation. Nontraditionally cast productions are shown to have participated in the national dialogue about race relations and ethnic identity and served as a source of renewed creativity for the staging of the canonical repertory.

Multiracial casting is explored first through its history, then through its artistic, political, and pragmatic dimensions. Next, the book focuses on case studies from the dominant genres of contemporary American theater: classical tragedy and comedy, modern domestic drama, antirealist drama, and the Broadway musical, using a broad array of archival source materials to enhance and illuminate its arguments.

Angela C. Pao is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.

A volume in the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance

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Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico
Osvaldo F. Pardo
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Osvaldo F. Pardo examines the early dissemination of European views on law and justice among Mexico’s native peoples. Newly arrived from Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mendicant friars brought not only their faith in the authority of the Catholic Church but also their reverence of the monarchy. Drawing on a rich range of documents dating from this era—including secular and ecclesiastical legislation, legal and religious treatises, bilingual catechisms, grammars on indigenous languages, historical accounts, and official reports and correspondence—Pardo finds that honor, as well as related notions such as reputation, came to play a central role in shaping the lives and social relations of colonists and indigenous Mexicans alike. Following the application and adaptation of European ideas of justice and royal and religious power as they took hold in the New World, Pardo sheds light on the formation of colonial legalities and long-lasting views, both secular and sacred, that still inform attitudes toward authority in contemporary Mexican society.
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The Origins of Mexican Catholicism
Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
Osvaldo F. Pardo
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"Pardo's study provides a persuasive criticism of the widespread assumption that the process of Christianization in Mexico can be conceived as the imposition of a complete and fool-proof system that did not accept doubts or compromises. The Origins of Mexican Catholicism will become an invaluable tool for future researchers and enrich future debates on the subject."
---Fernando Cervantes, Bristol University, UK

"Pardo does an excellent job of balancing and contrasting sixteenth-century Catholic theology with Nahua thought and belief."
---John F. Schwaller, University of Minnesota


At first glance, religious conversion may appear to be only a one-way street. When studying sixteenth-century Mexico, one might assume that colonial coercion was the driving force behind the religious conversion of the native population. But The Origins of Mexican Catholicism shows how Spanish missionaries instead drew on existing native ceremonies in order to make Christianity more accessible to the Nahua population whom they were trying to convert.

Osvaldo F. Pardo explains that religious figures not only shaped native thought, but that indigenous rituals had an impact on the religion itself. This work illustrates the complex negotiations that took place in the process of making the Christian sacraments available to the native peoples, and at the same time, forced the missionaries to reexamine the meaning of their sacraments through the eyes of an alien culture.

For Spanish missionaries, ritual not only became a focus of evangelical concern but also opened a window to the social world of the Nahuas. Missionaries were able to delve into the Nahua's notions of self, emotions, and social and cosmic order. By better understanding the sociological aspects of Nahua culture, Christians learned ways to adequately convey their religion through mutual understanding instead of merely colonial oppression.

Given its interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to specialists in Latin American intellectual and literary history, the history of religion, and anthropology, and to anyone interested in cross-cultural processes.
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Lost Eagles
One Man's Mission to Find Missing Airmen in Two World Wars
Blaine Pardoe
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Praise for Lost Eagles

"The pilot and observer stories selected have not previously seen much exposure. Not only are they interesting, but I found myself relishing getting to the next chapter to find out what Frederick Zinn was doing during the next stage of his life."
---Alan Roesler, founding member, League of World War I Aviation Historians, and former Managing Editor, Over the Front

Praise for Blaine Pardoe's previous military histories (which average 4.5-star customer reviews on Amazon.com):

Terror of the Autumn Skies: The True Story of Frank Luke, America's Rogue Ace of World War I

"This painstaking biography of World War I ace Frank Luke will earn Pardoe kudos . . . Pardoe has flown a very straight course in researching and recounting Luke's myth-ridden life. . . . Thorough annotation makes the book that much more valuable to WWI aviation scholars as well as for more casual air-combat buffs."
---Booklist

The Cruise of the Sea Eagle: The Amazing True Story of Imperial Germany's Gentleman Pirate

"This is a gem of a story, well told, and nicely laid out with photos, maps, and charts that cleverly illuminate the lost era of ‘gentlemen pirates' at sea . . . [German commerce raider Felix von Luckner's] legend lives on in this lively and readable biography."
---Admiral James Stavridis, U.S. Navy, Naval History

Few people have ever heard of Frederick Zinn, yet even today airmen's families are touched by this man and the work he performed in both world wars. Zinn created the techniques still in use to determine the final fate of airmen missing in action. The last line of the Air Force Creed reads, "We will leave no airman behind." Zinn made that promise possible.

Blaine Pardoe weaves together the complex story of a man who brought peace and closure to countless families who lost airmen during both world wars. His lasting contribution to warfare was a combination of his methodology for locating the remains of missing pilots (known as the Zinn system) and his innovation of imprinting all aircraft parts with the same serial number so that if a wreck was located, the crewman could be identified. The tradition he established for seeking and recovering airmen is carried on to this day.

Blaine Pardoe is an accomplished author who has published dozens of military fiction novels and other books, including the widely acclaimed Cubicle Warfare: Self-Defense Tactics for Today's Hypercompetitive Workplace; Terror of the Autumn Skies: The True Story of Frank Luke, America's Rogue Ace of World War I; and The Cruise of the Sea Eagle: The Amazing True Story of Imperial Germany's Gentleman Pirate.

Jacket photo: Frederick Zinn's Sopwith aircraft, which crashed during World War I. National Museum of the United States Air Force Archives. 

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Secret Witness
The Untold Story of the 1967 Bombing in Marshall, Michigan
Blaine Pardoe
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Every small town has a moment when the real world abruptly intrudes, shattering the town's notions of itself and its people. For citizens of Marshall, Michigan, that moment came August 18, 1967. Nola Puyear was working downtown at the Tasty Cafe that morning when she received a package. She opened it and was instantly killed in a fiery explosion.

In the months that followed, law enforcement and prosecutors wrestled with a crime that to all appearances was senseless. Evidence recovered from the blown-up restaurant, including a bottle of pills that had been tainted with lye, suggested a concerted plot to murder Mrs. Puyear. But why had someone wanted to kill the well-liked woman, by all accounts a pillar of her close-knit community? For that matter, was Marshall really the quaint paradise it seemed to be?

Secret Witness brings to light startling new evidence and freshly uncovered facts to address these and other questions that, to this day, surround one of Michigan's most brutal murders. Based on extensive interviews with surviving prosecutors, police, and witnesses, Blaine Pardoe re-creates the investigation that pried into Marshall's dark underbelly and uncovered the seamy private lives led by some of the town's citizenry but led to only tenuous theories about the bombing. The book also examines the pivotal role played by the Secret Witness program, an initiative by the Detroit News that offered rewards for anonymous tips related to violent crimes. What's ultimately revealed is the true depth of evil that occurred in Marshall that day. Every small town has dirty little secrets. This time, they were deadly.

[more]

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The Politics of Preference
Democratic Institutions and Affirmative Action in the United States and India
Sunita Parikh
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Sunita Parikh examines the history and fate of affirmative action programs in two ethnically heterogeneous democracies, the United States and India. Affirmative action programs in the United States represent a controversial policy about which the American public feel at best ambivalence and at worst hostility, while in India the expansion of reservation policies in recent years has led to riots and contributed to the fall of governments. And yet these policies were not particularly controversial when they were introduced. How the policy traveled from these auspicious beginnings to its current predicament can best be understood, according to Parikh, by exploring the changing political conditions under which it was introduced, expanded, and then challenged.
Although they are in many respects very different countries, India and the United States are important countries in which to study the implementation of ascriptive policies like affirmative action, according to Parikh. They are both large, heterogeneous societies with democratic political systems in which previously excluded groups were granted benefits by the majorities that had historically oppressed them. Parikh argues that these policies were the product of democratic politics--which required political parties to mobilize existing groups as voters--and the ethnically heterogeneous nature of Indian and U.S. society--where ethnic markers are particularly salient sources of identification as groups. Affirmative action in both countries was introduced because it could be used to solidify and expand electoral coalitions by giving benefits to defined minority groups, according to Parikh. As the policy became better known, it became more disliked by non-targeted groups, and it was no longer an appeal which was cost free for politicians.
This book will be of interest to social scientists concerned with race and ethnic relations and with the comparative study of political and social systems.
Sunita Parikh is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Columbia University.
[more]

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Following in Footsteps or Marching Alone?
How Institutional Differences Influence Renewable Energy Policy
Srinivas Parinandi
University of Michigan Press, 2023

In recent years, the federal government’s increasing inability to address major societal challenges has arguably hampered America’s commitment to renewable energy initiatives. Individual U.S. states have stepped into this void and adopted their own policies, leading some to believe that the states can propel America’s renewable energy industry forward. However, we know little about how legislative and regulatory dynamics within America’s states might accelerate or hinder renewable energy policy creation. 

In Following in Footsteps or Marching Alone?, Srinivas Parinandi explores how states have devised their own novel policies, and how the political workings of legislatures and public utilities commissions have impacted state renewable energy policy design. Through the meticulous study of nearly three decades of state-level renewable energy policy-making, he finds that their creation is primarily driven by legislatures, and that ideologically liberal legislatures largely push the envelope. The book suggests that having a predominantly state-driven renewable energy effort can lead to uneven and patchwork-based policy development outcomes, and a possible solution is to try to more successfully federalize these issues. Parinandi urges readers, scholars, and policy practitioners to consider whether a state-led effort is adequate enough to handle the task of building momentum for renewable energy in one of the world’s largest electricity markets.

[more]

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Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus
Arum Park
University of Michigan Press, 2023
In Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus, author Arum Park explores two notoriously difficult ancient Greek poets and seeks to articulate the complex relationship between them. Although Pindar and Aeschylus were contemporaries, previous scholarship has often treated them as representatives of contrasting worldviews. Park’s comparative study offers the alternative perspective of understanding them as complements instead. By examining these poets together through the concepts of reciprocity, truth, and gender, this book establishes a relationship between Pindar and Aeschylus that challenges previous conceptions of their dissimilarity. The book accomplishes three aims: first, it shows that Pindar and Aeschylus frame their poetry using similar principles of reciprocity; second, it demonstrates that each poet depicts truth in a way that is specific to those reciprocity principles; and finally, it illustrates how their depictions of gender are shaped by this intertwining of truth and reciprocity. By demonstrating their complementarity, the book situates Pindar and Aeschylus in the same poetic ecosystem, which has implications for how we understand ancient Greek poetry more broadly: using Pindar and Aeschylus as case studies, the book provides a window into their dynamic and interactive poetic world, a world in which ostensibly dissimilar poets and genres actually have much more in common than we might think.
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Media Reform and the Climate Emergency
Rethinking Communication in the Struggle for a Sustainable Future
David J Park
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Award-winning author David J. Park argues that the battle against global warming is also a fight for media reform. With his new book Media Reform and the Climate Emergency: Rethinking Communication in the Struggle for a Sustainable Future, he critically examines how advertising, the digital infrastructure, and journalism advance the climate emergency and lays out a path of reform to help create a more sustainable world. The production and consumption of goods and services within consumer societies lead to unsustainable greenhouse gas emissions, and Park finds that much of mass communication is either dependent upon or closely tied to the success of this social organization. As a result, he suggests successful environmental movements creatively dismantle or reform institutional infrastructures that extend the planetary global warming crisis and the unsustainable consumption of nature.

Communication policies and industries are part of these infrastructures. Advertising evolved to propel a new consumer society that would encourage the over-consumption of goods and services with harmful and unsustainable production processes. Our digital infrastructure is largely premised upon the surveillance of online consumer habits and preferences, with the goal to create individualized messages to more effectively persuade people to increase their consumption habits. Much of commercial journalism resists the drastic and immediate regulatory changes necessary to address the worst aspects of this crisis. This is because so many of the needed changes challenge the media’s source of income, their libertarian philosophy, and the general status quo, which is preferred by elites. Bound to foster conversations among scholars, activists, politicians, and those who work in the communication industries, this book rethinks mass communication and highlights how immediate reform is needed in the struggle for a sustainable planet.

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Politics Over Process
Partisan Conflict and Post-Passage Processes in the U.S. Congress
Hong Min Park
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Although the U.S. Constitution requires that the House of Representatives and the Senate pass legislation in identical form before it can be sent to the president for final approval, the process of resolving differences between the chambers has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Hong Min Park, Steven S. Smith, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen document the dramatic changes in intercameral resolution that have occurred over recent decades, and examine the various considerations made by the chambers when determining the manner in which the House and Senate pursue conciliation. Politics Over Process demonstrates that partisan competition, increasing party polarization, and institutional reforms have encouraged the majority party to more creatively restructure post-passage processes, often avoiding the traditional standing committee and conference processes altogether.
 
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Korean Families Yesterday and Today
Hyunjoon Park
University of Michigan Press, 2020

Korean families have changed significantly during the last few decades in their composition, structure, attitudes, and function. Delayed and forgone marriage, fertility decline, and rising divorce rates are just a few examples of changes that Korean families have experienced at a rapid pace, more dramatic than in many other contemporary societies. Moreover, the increase of marriages between Korean men and foreign women has further diversified Korean families. Yet traditional norms and attitudes toward gender and family continue to shape Korean men and women’s family behaviors.

Korean Families Yesterday and Today portrays diverse aspects of the contemporary Korean families and, by explicitly or implicitly situating contemporary families within a comparative historical perspective, reveal how the past of Korean families evolved into their current shapes. While the study of families can be approached in many different angles, our lens focuses on families with children or young adults who are about to forge family through marriage and other means. This focus reflects that delayed marriage and declined fertility are two sweeping demographic trends in Korea, affecting family formation. Moreover, “intensive” parenting has characterized Korean young parents and therefore, examining change and persistence in parenting provides important clues for family change in Korea.

This volume should be of interest not only to readers who are interested in Korea but also to those who want to understand broad family changes in East Asia in comparative perspective.

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front cover of Change and the Persistence of Tradition in India
Change and the Persistence of Tradition in India
Five Lectures
Richard Park
University of Michigan Press, 1971
The lectures presented in this volume were given during the summer of 1970 under the sponsorship of the CIC Summer Program on South Asia and the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies of the University of Michigan. It should be recognized that these essays appear in revised lecture form, and not as fully polished scholarly papers. They carry nevertheless the authority—and no little verve—of experienced scholars concerned with both the traditions and the changes so characteristic of modern India. [v]
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Revisiting Minjung
New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea
Sunyoung Park
University of Michigan Press, 2019
An epoch-marking alliance of laborers, students, dissident intellectuals, and ordinary citizens was at the heart of South Korea’s transformation from a dictatorship into a vibrant democracy during the 1980s. Collectively known as the minjung (“the people”), these agents of Korean democratization historically carved out an expanded role for civil society in the country’s politics. In Revisiting Minjung, some of the foremost experts in 1980s Korean history, literature, film, art, and music provide new insights into one of the most crucial decades in South Korean history. Drawing from the theoretical perspectives of transnationalism, post-Marxist studies, intersectional feminism, popular culture studies, and more, the volume demonstrates how an era that is often associated with radical politics was, in effect, the catalyst for the subsequent flourishing of democratic and liberal values in South Korea.
 
Revisiting Minjung brings new themes, new subjectivities, and new theoretical perspectives to the study of the rich ecosystem of 1980s Korean culture. Treated here is a wide array of topics, including the origins of minjung ideology, its critique by the right wing, minjung art and music, workers’ literary culture, women writers and the resurgence of feminism, erotic cinema, science fiction, transnational political travels, and the representations of race and queerness in 1980s popular culture. The book thus details the origins and development of some of the movements that shape cultural life in South Korea today, and it does so through analyses that engage some of the most pressing debates in current scholarship in Korea and abroad.
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The Future of Digital Surveillance
Why Digital Monitoring Will Never Lose Its Appeal in a World of Algorithm-Driven AI
Yong Jin Park
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Are humans hard-wired to make good decisions about managing their privacy in an increasingly public world? Or are we helpless victims of surveillance through our use of invasive digital media? Exploring the chasm between the tyranny of surveillance and the ideal of privacy, this book traces the origins of personal data collection in digital technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in social network sites, search engines, mobile apps, the web, and email. The Future of Digital Surveillance argues against a technologically deterministic view—digital technologies by nature do not cause surveillance. Instead, the shaping of surveillance technologies is embedded in a complex set of individual psychology, institutional behaviors, and policy principles.

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Capitol Investments
The Marketability of Political Skills
Glenn R. Parker
University of Michigan Press, 2011

“Who would spend millions for a job that pays $250k? Parker’s answer will surprise you. Required reading for Congress jocks.”
—Michael C. Munger, Duke University

“A unique and interesting approach to the study of legislators and legislative institutions.”
—David Brady, Stanford University

What would you do if, the very day you were hired, you knew you could be unemployed in as little as two years? You’d seek opportunities in your current job to develop a portfolio of skills and contacts in order to make yourself more attractive to future employers. Representatives and senators think about their jobs in Congress in precisely this way, according to Glenn R. Parker.

While in office, members of Congress plan not merely for the next election but for the next stage of their careers. By networking, serving on committees, and championing particular legislation, they deliberately accumulate human capital—expertise, networks, and reputation—which later gives them advantages on the job market. Parker’s study of the postelective careers of more than 200 former members of Congress who left office during the last half century shows that, in most cases, the human capital these politicians amassed while in office increased their occupational mobility and earning power.

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Congress and the Rent-Seeking Society
Glenn R. Parker
University of Michigan Press, 1996


Skillfully blending historical data with microeconomic theory, Glenn Parker argues that the incentives for congressional service have declined over the years, and that with that decline has come a change in the kind of person who seeks to enter Congress. The decline in the attractiveness of Congress is a consequence of congressional careerists and of the growth in the rent-seeking society, a term which describes the efforts of special interests to obtain preferential treatment by using the machinery of government--legislation and regulations.

Parker provides a fresh and controversial perspective to the debate surrounding the relative merits of career or amateur politicians. He argues that driving career politicians from office can have pernicious effects on the political system: it places the running of Congress in the hands of amateur politicians, who stand to lose little if they are found engaging in illegal or quasi-legal practices. On the other hand, career legislators risk all they have invested in their long careers in public service if they engage in unsavory practices. As Parker develops this controversial argument, he provides a fresh perspective on the debate surrounding the value of career versus amateur politicians.

Little attention has been given to the long-term impact of a rent-seeking society on the evolution of political institutions. Parker examines empirically and finds support for hypotheses that reflect potential symptoms of adverse selection in the composition of Congress: (1) rent-seeking politicians are more inclined than others to manipulate institutional arrangements for financial gain; (2) the rent-seeking milieu of legislators are more likely to engage in rent-seeking activity than earlier generations; (3) and the growth of rent-seeking activity has hastened the departure of career legislators.

Glenn R. Parker is Distinguished Research Professor, Florida State University.

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front cover of Institutional Change, Discretion, and the Making of Modern Congress
Institutional Change, Discretion, and the Making of Modern Congress
An Economic Interpretation
Glenn R. Parker
University of Michigan Press, 1992
Controversial new interpretation of legislators' behavior
[more]

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An Emotional State
The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture
Anna M. Parkinson
University of Michigan Press, 2015
This literary-historical study seeks to dismantle the prevailing notion that Germany, in the period following the Second World War, exhibited an “inability to mourn,” arguing that in fact this period experienced a surge of affect. Anna Parkinson examines the emotions explicitly manifested or addressed in a variety of German cultural artifacts, while also identifying previously unacknowledged (and undertheorized) affective structures implicitly at work during the country’s national crisis. Much of the scholarship in the expanding field of affect theory distrusts Freudian psychoanalysis, which does not differentiate between emotion and affect.
 
One of the book’s major contributions is that it offers an analytical distinction between emotion and affect, finding a compelling way to talk about affect and emotion that is informed by affect theory but that integrates psychoanalysis. The study draws on the psychoanalytic writings of Freud, Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, and André Green, while engaging with interdisciplinary theorists of affect including Barbara Rosenwein, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick among many others. 


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Four Point Listening and Speaking 2, Second Ed., Supplemental Audiofiles
Audio Download
Betsy Parrish
University of Michigan Press, 2014
These audiofiles accompany the content in Four Point: Listening-Speaking 2, Second Edition (978-0-472-03742-1). The 12 MP3 files include content that facilitates the use of the material presented in the textbook. The running time is 1:49:06. 

This audio download product is NOT an audio reproduction of all the content in the accompanying textbook (Four Point: Listening & Speaking 2, Second Edition). 

The Four Point series is designed for English language learners whose primary goal is to succeed in an academic setting.The series covers the four academic skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking while providing reinforcement and systematic recycling of key vocabulary and further exposure to grammar issues. In order to participate in academic settings, English learners need focused activities to develop and then maintain their use of vocabulary and grammar. Each book in the series focuses heavily on vocabulary in particular, highlighting between 125-150 key vocabulary items including individual words, compound words, phrasal verbs, short phrases, idioms, metaphors, collocations, and longer set lexical phrases.
[more]

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Citizen Rauh
An American Liberal's Life in Law and Politics
Michael E. Parrish
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"Joe Rauh was the type of lawyer who comes along maybe once in a generation---talented, politically astute, effective, and stubbornly devoted to principles, the type of person who not only could but did make a difference. He deserves a biography that explores not only his persona, but the America in which he lived and worked, and how he made a difference to so many people. Michael Parrish has given us just such a book, an exceedingly fine, well-written story that will make clear to another generation not only who Joe Rauh was, but why we as a nation will always need someone like him."
---Melvin I. Urofsky, Professor of Law and Public Policy, Virginia Commonwealth University

"Michael Parrish has captured the life of this great civil libertarian in splendid fashion. His biography of this energetic New Deal liberal weaves effortlessly between public and private, friend and foe, victory and defeat. With Parrish as a sure guide, Citizen Rauh transports the reader through an American history that begins with Sacco and Vanzetti and ends as he battles CIA skullduggery in the 1980s. This biography should be on your shelf and in your heart."
---Nelson Lichtenstein, MacArthur Foundation Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Michael Parrish has fashioned a biography filled with Rauh's spirit, achievements, his losses, and above all, the importance of his presence. This is a wonderful account of a giant of late 20th century political and legal affairs."
---Stanley Kutler, E. Gordon Fox Professor Emeritus of American Institutions, History, and Law, University of Wisconsin, Madison

"The causes to which Rauh committed his life retain their moral force today. This well-crafted, often powerful, biographical study will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in postwar liberalism."
---Daniel Scroop, University of Sheffield
 
Citizen Rauh tells the story of American lawyer Joseph L. Rauh Jr., who kept alive the ideals of New Deal liberalism and broadened those ideals to include a commitment to civil rights. Rauh's clients included Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, A. Philip Randolph, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. With good reason Freedom Rider John Lewis once called him "the blackest white man I ever knew."
 
No lawyer in the post-1945 era did more to protect the economic interests of working-class Americans than Rauh, who fought for the unions as they struggled for legitimacy and against them when they betrayed their own members. No lawyer stood more courageously against repressive anticommunism during the 1950s or advanced the cause of racial justice more vigorously in the 1960s and 1970s. No lawyer did more to defend the constitutional vision of the Warren Court and resist the efforts of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to undo its legacy. Throughout his life, Rauh continued to articulate a progressive vision of law and politics, ever confident that his brand of liberalism would become vital once again when the cycle of American politics took another turn.
 
Jacket design by Paula Newcomb

Jacket photograph: Joseph L. Rauh Jr. with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Courtesy of the Estate of Olie W. Rauh.

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front cover of Becoming a Social Science Researcher
Becoming a Social Science Researcher
Quest and Context
Bruce Parrott
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Becoming a Social Science Researcher is designed to help aspiring social scientists, including credentialed scholars, understand the formidable complexities of the research process. Instead of explaining specific research techniques, it concentrates on the philosophical, sociological, and psychological dimensions of social research. These dimensions have received little coverage in guides written for social science researchers, but they are arguably even more important than particular analytical techniques. Truly sophisticated social science scholarship requires that researchers understand the intellectual and social contexts in which they collect and interpret information. While social science training in US graduate schools has become more systematic over the past two decades, graduate training and published guidance still fall short in addressing this fundamental need.

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Understanding Torture
Law, Violence, and Political Identity
John Parry
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"John Parry's Understanding Torture is an important contribution to our understanding of how torture fits within the practices and beliefs of the modern state. His juxtaposition of the often indeterminate nature of the law of torture with the very specific state practices of torture is both startling and revealing."
---Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities at Yale Law School and author of Sacred Violence

"Parry is effective in building, deploying, and supporting his argument . . . that the law does not provide effective protections against torture, but also that the law is in itself constitutive of a political order in which torture is employed to create---and to destroy or re-create---political identities.”
---Margaret Satterthwaite, Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and Associate Professor of Clinical Law, NYU School of Law

"A beautifully crafted, convincingly argued book that does not shy away from addressing the legal and ethical complexities of torture in the modern world. In a field that all too often produces simple or superficial responses to what has become an increasingly challenging issue, Understanding Torture stands out as a sophisticated and intellectually responsible work."
---Ruth Miller, Associate Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Prohibiting torture will not end it. In Understanding Torture, John T. Parry explains that torture is already a normal part of the state coercive apparatus. Torture is about dominating the victim for a variety of purposes, including public order; control of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; and--- critically---domination for the sake of domination. Seen in this way, Abu Ghraib sits on a continuum with contemporary police violence in U.S. cities; violent repression of racial minorities throughout U.S. history; and the exercise of power in a variety of political, social, and interpersonal contacts.
Creating a separate category for an intentionally narrow set of practices labeled and banned as torture, Parry argues, serves to normalize and legitimate the remaining practices that are "not torture." Consequently, we must question the hope that law can play an important role in regulating state violence.
 
No one who reads this book can fail to understand the centrality of torture in modern law, politics, and governance.
 
John T. Parry is Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School.
[more]

front cover of Chipped Stone Tools in Formative Oaxaca, Mexico
Chipped Stone Tools in Formative Oaxaca, Mexico
Their Procurement, Production and Use
William J. Parry
University of Michigan Press, 1987
Chipped stone tools from archaeological sites can be a source of social and economic information about the inhabitants. In this volume, author William J. Parry presents his analysis of chipped stone tools found at Early and Middle Formative sites in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. Volume 8 of the subseries Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca.
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front cover of The Garnsey Spring Campsite
The Garnsey Spring Campsite
Late Prehistoric Occupation in Southeastern New Mexico
William J. Parry
University of Michigan Press, 1984
In 1977 and 1978, Parry and Speth excavated the Garnsey Spring site, an aboriginal campsite southeast of Roswell, New Mexico. Here they describe their fieldwork and the analysis of the artifacts found at the site, including lithics and ceramics. Pollen analysis is also included.
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front cover of The Last Pescadores of Chimalhuacán, Mexico
The Last Pescadores of Chimalhuacán, Mexico
An Archaeological Ethnography
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Based on his study of the nearly vanished aquatic economy of Chimalhuacán in the Valley of Mexico, Parsons describes the surviving vestiges of aquatic insect collection and fishing and considers their developmental and archaeological implications within a broad context of historical, ethnographic, biological, ecological, and archaeological information from Mexico, North and South America, the Near East, and Africa. Activities, implements, artifacts, and landscapes are richly illustrated, in many cases with the author’s own photos and a number of vintage photographs. The study concludes that aquatic resources were fully complementary with agricultural products during prehispanic times in Mesoamerica where a pastoral economy was absent.
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front cover of The Last Saltmakers of Nexquipayac, Mexico
The Last Saltmakers of Nexquipayac, Mexico
An Archaeological Ethnography
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 2001
In the 1980s, a few traditional saltmakers were still manufacturing several kinds of salt in the eastern Valley of Mexico. This in-depth study of the methodology of this dying craft includes a comparative study of pre-industrial saltmaking around the world and considers the implications of this knowledge for future archaeological research.
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front cover of Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Northwestern Valley of Mexico
Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Northwestern Valley of Mexico
The Zumpango Region
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 2008
This monograph presents data from a systematic regional archaeological survey carried out over an area of ca. 600 square kilometers during May through December 1973 by the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology.
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front cover of Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Texcoco Region, Mexico
Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Texcoco Region, Mexico
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 1971
In this volume, archaeologist Jeffrey R. Parsons presents research based on an extensive 1967 survey of the Texcoco Region in the Valley of Mexico. The sites are organized by time period, from Middle Formative to Aztec. Parsons describes the sites in detail and compares them to those of the same time periods in the Teotihuacan Valley and the Valley of Mexico in general.
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front cover of Remembering Archaeological Fieldwork in Mexico and Peru, 1961-2003
Remembering Archaeological Fieldwork in Mexico and Peru, 1961-2003
A Photographic Essay
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Half a century ago, when archaeologist Jeffrey R. Parsons began fieldwork in Mexico and Peru, he could not know that many of the sites he studied were on the brink of destruction. The rural landscapes through which he traveled were, in many cases, destined to be plowed under and paved over. In Remembering Archaeological Fieldwork in Mexico and Peru, 1961–2003, Parsons offers readers a chance to see archaeological sites that were hundreds or thousands of years old and have since vanished or been irrevocably altered. Hundreds of photographs, accompanied by descriptions, illustrate the sites, the people, and the landscapes that Parsons encountered during four decades of research in these regions. Parsons is now emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and has published many archaeological monographs as well as ethnographic research on salt, fish, and other items used for traditional subsistence in Mexico. Foreword by Richard I. Ford.
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front cover of Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Southern Valley of Mexico
Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Southern Valley of Mexico
The Chalco-Xochimilco Region
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 1982
Extensive description and analysis of the archaeological settlement data collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the Chalco-Xochimilco Region in the Valley of Mexico.
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front cover of Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Upper Mantaro and Tarma Drainages, Junín, Peru
Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Upper Mantaro and Tarma Drainages, Junín, Peru
The Tarama-Chinchaycocha Region, Vol. 1, Parts 1 and 2
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 2000
An archaeological study of ancient settlement patterns in Peru’s rugged and diverse central highlands.
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Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Upper Mantaro and Tarma Drainages, Junín, Peru
Volume 2, The Wanka Region
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 2000
This monograph is based on six months of systematic regional survey in the Wanka Region of Peru’s sierra central, carried out in two field seasons in 1975–1976 by the Junin Archaeological Research Project (JASP) under the co-direction of Jeffrey R. Parsons (University of Michigan) and Ramiro Matos Mendieta (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos).
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front cover of Archaeological Settlement Pattern Data from the Chalco, Xochimilco, Ixtapalapa, Texcoco and Zumpango Regions, Mexico
Archaeological Settlement Pattern Data from the Chalco, Xochimilco, Ixtapalapa, Texcoco and Zumpango Regions, Mexico
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 1983
This report is a descriptive tabulation of settlement pattern data collected by University of Michigan projects in the Valley of Mexico between 1967 and 1973. Data is presented in tabular form for hundreds of sites, including information on environmental zones, elevation, rainfall, soil depth, phases of occupation, and more.
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front cover of Maguey Utilization in Highland Central Mexico
Maguey Utilization in Highland Central Mexico
An Archaeological Ethnography
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 1990
The maguey plant plays a central role in cultural adaptation and cultural change in highland Mesoamerica. This book is a comprehensive study of the plant and its use. Includes chapters on maguey cultivation and pulque production, maguey fiber processing and spinning, and the archaeological implications of the available ethnographic and historic information about maguey utilization.
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front cover of On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë
On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights in Japan
Judith Pascoe
University of Michigan Press, 2017
While teaching in Japan, Judith Pascoe was fascinated to discover the popularity that Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights has enjoyed there. Nearly 100 years after its first formal introduction to the country, the novel continues to engage the imaginations of Japanese novelists, filmmakers, manga artists and others, resulting in numerous translations, adaptations, and dramatizations. On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë is Pascoe’s lively account of her quest to discover the reasons for the continuous Japanese embrace of Wuthering Heights, including quite varied and surprising adaptations of the novel. At the same time, the book chronicles Pascoe’s experience as an adult student of Japanese. She contemplates the multiple Japanese translations of Brontë, as contrasted to the single (or non-existent) English translations of major Japanese writers. Carrying out a close reading of a distant country’s Wuthering Heights, Pascoe begins to see American literary culture as a small island on which readers are isolated from foreign literature.
 
In this and in her previous book, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, Pascoe’s engaging narrative innovates a new scholarly form involving immersive research practice to attempt a cross-cultural version of reader-response criticism. On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë will appeal to scholars in the fields of 19th-century British literature, adaptation studies, and Japanese literary history.
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front cover of The Sarah Siddons Audio Files
The Sarah Siddons Audio Files
Romanticism and the Lost Voice
Judith Pascoe
University of Michigan Press, 2013

English actress Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) was an international celebrity widely acclaimed for her performances of tragic heroines.We know what Siddons looked like—an endless number of artists asked her to sit for portraits and sculptures—but what of her famous voice? In lively and engaging prose, Judith Pascoe journeys to discover how the celebrated romantic actor’s voice sounded and to understand its power to move audiences to a state of emotional collapse. The author’s quixotic endeavor leads her to enroll in a “Voice for Actors” class, to collect Lady Macbeth voice prints, and to listen more carefully to the soundscape of her own life. 
 
The Sarah Siddons Audio Files is the first full-scale attempt to address the importance of the voice in romantic culture. Bringing together archival discoveries, sound recording history, and media theory, the book shows how the romantic poets’ preoccupation with voices is linked to a larger cultural anxiety about the voice’s ephemerality. The Sarah Siddons Audio Files contributes to a growing body of work on the fascinating history of sound, and will engage a broad audience interest in how recording technology has altered human experience.

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It's Legal but It Ain't Right
Harmful Social Consequences of Legal Industries
Nikos Passas
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Many U.S. corporations and the goods they produce negatively impact our society without breaking any laws. We are all too familiar with the tobacco industry's effect on public health and health care costs for smokers and nonsmokers, as well as the role of profit in the pharmaceutical industry's research priorities. It's Legal but It Ain't Right tackles these issues, plus the ethical ambiguities of legalized gambling, the firearms trade, the fast food industry, the pesticide industry, private security companies, and more. Aiming to identify industries and goods that undermine our societal values and to hold them accountable for their actions, this collection makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of ethics in our time.

This accessible exploration of corporate legitimacy and crime will be important reading for advocates, journalists, students, and anyone interested in the dichotomy between law and legitimacy.
Nikos Passas is Professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.

Neva Goodwin is Co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.

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Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan
The Development of the Feminist Movement
Mara Patessio
University of Michigan Press, 2011
Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan focuses on women’s activities in the new public spaces of Meiji Japan. With chapters on public, private, and missionary schools for girls, their students, and teachers, on social and political groups women created, on female employment, and on women’s participation in print media, this book offers a new perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese history. Women’s founding of and participation in conflicting discourses over the value of women in Meiji public life demonstrate that during this period active and vocal women were everywhere, that they did not meekly submit to the dictates of the government and intellectuals over what women could or should do, and that they were fully integrated in the production of Meiji culture.
Mara Patessio shows that the study of women is fundamental not only in order to understand fully the transformations of the Meiji period, but also to understand how later generations of women could successfully move the battle forward. Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan is essential reading for all students and teachers of 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese history and is of interest to scholars of women’s history more generally.
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front cover of Sources of the Synoptic Gospels
Sources of the Synoptic Gospels
Carl Patton
University of Michigan Press, 1915
This volume considers recent investigations into the Synoptic Problem and its recent analysis, and pushes the question farther based on that body of research. Minute differences among versions of the Gospels are compared, toward arriving at a better sense of underlying textual transmission.
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front cover of Temples for Cahokia Lords
Temples for Cahokia Lords
Preston Holder's 1955–1956 Excavations of Kunnemann Mound
Timothy R. Pauketat
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Preston Holder, a brilliant iconoclast, excavated these mounds in 1955. Decades later, the excavation still stands as one of the best-documented major excavations of the Cahokia area. This volume, meticulously researched and written, is the book Holder never completed. Pauketat also includes the massive research and theoretical developments that have emerged since 1957.
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Poetry in the Museums of Modernism
Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein
Catherine E. Paul
University of Michigan Press, 2002
This book explores the relationships between four modernist poets and the museums that helped shape their writing. During the early twentieth century, museums were trying to reach a wider audience and used displayed objects to teach that audience about art, culture, and ecology. Writers such as Yeats, Pound, Moore, and Stein borrowed strategies and techniques from museums in order to create literary modernism. Poetry in the Museums of Modernism places these writers' poetry and prose within the context of specific gallery spaces, curatorial practices, displayed objects, and exhibition objectives of the museums that inspired them, exposing the ways in which literary modernism is linked to museums.
Although critics have attested to the importance of the visual arts to literary modernists and have begun to explore the relationships between literary production and social institutions, before now no one has examined the particular institutions in which modernist poets found the artworks, specimens, and other artifacts that inspired their literary innovations. Catherine Paul's book offers the reader a fresh encounter with modernism that will interest literary and art historians, literary theorists, critics, and scholars in cultural studies and museum studies.
Catherine Paul is Associate Professor of English, Clemson University.
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Roman Coins and Public Life under the Empire
E. Togo Salmon Papers II
George MacKay Paul
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Roman coins often shed light on Roman public life and society through the legends, portraits, and images they bear. The papers collected in this volume were originally presented at the Second E. Togo Salmon Conference on Roman Studies. The eight contributors are specialists in Roman coins or Roman history and in the relations between them.
Coins are a unique source of information about the Roman world. In the case of the Roman Empire they were issued by or with the approval of the ruling power. The representations and legends they show therefore present an official view of contemporary affairs. The coins themselves, minted for official purposes such as paying the army, when studied carefully can help reconstruct official policies. They can also occasionally reveal what monuments now lost may have looked like.
It is not infrequent to come across pleas that the ancient historian should make more frequent use of numismatic evidence. These essays make clear that efforts are being made both by numismatists and by historians to bring the two disciplines together. At the same time the papers reveal that the task is by no means a straightforward one. The survival of Roman coins is variable, and so attempts to reconstruct the size and distribution of issues calls for skilled and experienced analysis. This collection of papers provides evidence for the kind of deductions that the historian may make from Roman coins as well as the illustrations of the pitfalls that await the unwary.
Those interested in Roman history, amateur coin collectors, and professional numismatists will all find much here to widen their knowledge of the public context of Roman coins.
George Paul is Professor of Classics, McMaster University. Michael Ierardi is Lecturer in Classics, McMaster University.
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Analyzing Performance
Theater, Dance, and Film
Patrice Pavis
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Analyzing Performance provides conceptual tools for understanding a range of performance, including theater, dance, cinema, other audiovisual media, and mime. This richly illustrated book develops protocols for the analysis of performance at every level -- from the minute gestures and facial expressions of an actor to the social network in which theater is embedded -- and respects the importance of every aspect of performance, including actor, costume, space, time, music, and lighting. With a keen awareness of the roles of social context in the interpretation of performance, Patrice Pavis leads the reader from a purely formal analysis to a semiology and anthropology of performance, where spectator and actor are equally objects of study. Drawn from performance traditions and innovations all over the world, the book's many examples make critical techniques vivid and concrete.
Analyzing Performance will be essential reading for critics, scholars, students, and practitioners of theater, who will find that David Williams's elegant translation brings Pavis's insights within reach of English-language readers.
Patrice Pavis, Professor of Theater at Paris-VIII University, has written extensively and influentially on performance.
David Williams is Professor of Theater, Dartington College of Arts, Devon, England.
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Aeneas
Lee Pearcy
University of Michigan Press, 2021
The central character of Vergil’s Aeneid seems to elude readers. To some, he is unlikable; to others, he seems unreal, a figure on which to hang a plot. Aeneas discovers a tragic figure whose defining virtue depends on a past that has been stripped from him, and whose destiny blocks him from the knowledge of the future that gives meaning to his life. His choices, silences, tears, and anger reflect an existential struggle that, in the end, he loses. Aeneas is a hero of the Trojan War, a time as distant from Vergil as Vergil is from us, but he is also a literary character created in response to political chaos and civil strife as the Roman Republic gave way to the Augustan empire. Lee T. Pearcy’s book creates an Aeneas for our time: an age of liquid modernity, when identities seem fungible and precarious, amid a moment of political conflict and collapsing institutions. This volume gives readers new translations and close readings of important passages, and it restores Aeneas to the center of Rome’s most important poem.
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Party Discipline in the U.S. House of Representatives
Kathryn Pearson
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Political party leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives command greater loyalty than ever from fellow party members in roll call votes, campaign contributions, and partisan speeches. In return, leaders reward compliant members with opportunities to promote constituent interests and to advance their own political careers. Denial of such privileges as retribution against those who don’t fully support the party agenda may significantly damage a member’s prospects.

Kathryn Pearson examines the disciplinary measures that party leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives employ to exact such loyalty, as well as the consequences for a democratic legislature. Drawing upon data from 1987–2010, Pearson identifies the conditions under which party leaders opt to prioritize policy control and those which induce them to prioritize majority control. She then assesses the ways in which these choices affect, on one hand, the party’s ability to achieve its goals, and on the other hand, rank-and-file members’ ability to represent their constituents. Astute party leaders recognize the need for balance, as voters could oust representatives who repeatedly support the party’s agenda over their constituents’ concerns, thereby jeopardizing the number of seats their party holds.

In her conclusion, Pearson discusses the consequences of party discipline such as legislative gridlock, stalled bills, and proposals banned from the agenda. Although party discipline is likely to remain strong as citizens become more cognizant of enforced party loyalty, their increasing dissatisfaction with Congress may spur change.
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The Street Porter and the Philosopher
Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism
Sandra Peart
University of Michigan Press, 2009

Adam Smith, asserting the common humanity of the street porter and the philosopher, articulated the classical economists' model of social interactions as exchanges among equals. This model had largely fallen out of favor until, recently, a number of scholars in the avant-garde of economic thought rediscovered it and rechristened it "analytical egalitarianism." In this volume, Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy bring together an impressive array of authors to explore the ramifications of this analytical ideal and to discuss the ways in which an egalitarian theory of individuality can enable economists to reconcile ideas from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

"The analytical egalitarianism project that Peart and Levy have advanced has come to occupy a prominent place in the current agenda of historians of economic thought."
---Ross Emmett, Associate Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Michigan Center for Innovation and Economic Prosperity, Michigan State University

"These essays and dialogs from the Summer Institute would make Adam Smith, economist and moral philosopher, proud."
---J. Daniel Hammond, Hultquist Family Professor of Economics, Wake Forest University

With essays by:

  • James M. Buchanan, Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences recipient (1985) and Professor Emeritus, George Mason University and Virginia Polytechnic and State University
  • Juan Pablo Couyoumdijian, Universidad del Desearrollo, Chile
  • Tyler Cowen, George Mason University
  • Eric Crampton, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
  • Andrew Farrant, Dickinson College
  • Samuel Hollander, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto
  • M. Ali Khan, Johns Hopkins University
  • Thomas Leonard, Princeton University
  • Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois, Chicago
  • Leonidas Montes, Dean of School of Government, Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, Chile
  • Maria Pia Paganelli, Yeshiva University and New York University
  • Warren J. Samuels, Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University
  • Eric Schliesser, VENI post-doctoral research fellow, Leiden University, and University of Amsterdam
  • Gordon Tullock, George Mason University

Sandra J. Peart is Dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, Virginia.

David M. Levy is Professor of Economics at George Mason University (GMU) and Research Associate at the Center for Study of Public Choice at GMU.

They are Co-Directors of George Mason University's Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economics.

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The "Vanity of the Philosopher"
From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics
Sandra Peart
University of Michigan Press, 2005
The "Vanity of the Philosopher" continues the themes introduced in Levy's acclaimed book How the Dismal Science Got Its Name.

Here, Peart and Levy tackle the issues of racism, eugenics, hierarchy, and egalitarianism in classical economics and take a broad view of classical economics' doctrine of human equality. Responding to perennial accusations from the left and the right that the market economy has created either inequality or too much equality, the authors trace the role of the eugenics movement in pulling economics away from the classical economist's respect for the individual toward a more racist view at the turn of the century.

The "Vanity of the Philosopher" reveals the consequences of hierarchy in social science. It shows how the "vanity of the philosopher" has led to recommendations that range from the more benign but still objectionable "looking after" paternalism, to overriding preferences, and, in the extreme, to eliminating purportedly bad preferences. The authors suggest that an approach that abstracts from difference and presumes equal competence is morally compelling.

"People in the know on intellectual history and economics await the next book from Peart and Levy with much the same enthusiasm that greets a new Harry Potter book in the wider world. This book delivers the anticipated delights big time!"
-William Easterly, Professor of Economics and Africana Studies, NYU, and non-resident Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development

"In their customary idiosyncratic manner, Sandra Peart and David Levy reexamine the way in which the views of classical economists on equality and hierarchy were shifted by contact with scholars in other disciplines, and the impact this had on attitudes towards race, immigration, and eugenics. This is an imaginative and solid work of scholarship, with an important historical message and useful lessons for scholars today."
-Stanley Engerman, John Munro Professor of Economics and Professor of History, University of Rochester


Sandra J. Peart, Professor of Economics at Baldwin-Wallace College, has published articles on utilitarianism, the methodology of J. S. Mill, and the transition to neoclassicism. This is her fourth book. David M. Levy is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Director of the Center for Study of Public Choice. This is his third book.
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The Life and Work of Francis Willey Kelsey
Archaeology, Antiquity, and the Arts
John G Pedley
University of Michigan Press, 2011

President of the Archaeological Institute of America, professor at the University of Michigan from 1889 to 1927, and president of the American Philological Association, Francis Kelsey was crucially involved in the founding or growth of major educational institutions. He came to maturity in a period of great technological change in communications, transportation, and manufacturing. Kelsey took full advantage of such innovations in his ceaseless drive to promote education for all, to further the expansion of knowledge, and to champion the benefits of the study of antiquity.

A vigorous traveler around the United States, Europe, and the Mediterranean, Kelsey strongly believed in the value of personally viewing sites ancient and modern and collecting artifacts that could be used by the new museums and universities that were springing up in the United States. This collecting habit put him in touch with major financiers of the day, including Charles Freer, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, as he sought their help for important projects.

Drawing heavily on Kelsey's daily diaries now held at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library, John Griffiths Pedley gives us a biography that records the wide-ranging activities of a gifted and energetic scholar whose achievements mirrored the creative and contributive innovations of his contemporary Americans.

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What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?
Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint
Jaroslav Pelikan
University of Michigan Press, 1997
The debate about evolution and creationism is striking evidence of the tensions between biblical and philosophical-scientific explanations of the origins of the universe. For most of the past twenty centuries, important historical context for the debate has been supplied by the relation (or "counterpoint") between two monumental texts: Plato's Timaeus and the Book of Genesis.
In What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?, Jaroslav Pelikan examines the origins of this counterpoint. He reviews the central philosophical issues of origins as posed in classical Rome by Lucretius, and he then proceeds to an examination of Timaeus and Genesis, with Timaeus' Plato representing Athens and Genesis' Moses representing Jerusalem. He then follows the three most important case studies of the counterpoint--in the Jewish philosophical theology of Alexandria, in the Christian thought of Constantinople, and in the intellectual foundations of the Western Middles Ages represented by Catholic Rome, where Timaeus would be the only Platonic dialogue in general circulation.
Whatever Plato may have intended originally in writing Timaeus, it has for most of the intervening period been read in the light of Genesis. Conversely, Genesis has been known, not in the original Hebrew, but in Greek and Latin translations that were seen to bear a distinct resemblance to one another and to the Latin version of Timaeus. Pelikan's study leads to original findings that deal with Christian doctrine in the period of the church fathers, including the Three Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa) in the East, and in the West, Ambrose, Augustine, and Boethius. All of these vitally important authors addressed the problem of the "counterpoint," and neither they nor these primary texts can become fully intelligible without attention to the central issues being explored here.
What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? will be of interest to historians, theologians, and philosophers and to anyone with interest in any of the religious traditions addressed herein.
 
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Colonial Subjects
Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology
Peter Pels
University of Michigan Press, 2000
It is often forgotten that anthropology--the scientific study of cultural difference--arose from situations that required a practical management of cultural differences. Out of the practical contexts of colonial contact--administration, mission, nationalism, policing, settler cultivation, tourism, warfare--emerged methods, and images of otherness, that inform anthropological notions of cultural difference to this day.
The essays in this volume share the assumption that "ethnography," far from being the unique purview of anthropology, is a broader field of practice out of which and alongside which anthropology attempted to distinguish itself as a scientific discipline. They explore a variety of situations in colonial South and Southeast Asia and Africa and in the treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of North America and Australia to provide genealogies of present-day anthropological practices, tracing them back to the subjects of colonial ethnography.
This book introduces into the history of anthropology many of the insights developed in recent studies in history, cultural studies, and the anthropology of colonialism. It can serve as a course book in the history of anthropology and the anthropology of colonialism, while at the same time addressing a much larger audience of students of colonial history, of the history of science and modernity, and of globalization.
Peter Pels is Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. Oscar Salemink is Program Officer for Social Sciences and Humanities, The Ford Foundation-Vietnam.
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Socialist Modern
East German Everyday Culture and Politics
Katherine Pence
University of Michigan Press, 2008

The reunification of Germany in 1989 may have put an end to the experiment in East German communism, but its historical assessment is far from over. Where most of the literature over the past two decades has been driven by the desire to uncover the relationship between power and resistance, complicity and consent, more recent scholarship tends to concentrate on the everyday history of East German citizens.

This volume builds on the latest literature by exploring the development and experience of life in East Germany, with a particular view toward addressing the question: What did modernity mean for the East German state and society? As such, the collection moves beyond the conceptual divide between state-level politics and everyday life to sharply focus on the specific contours of the GDR's unique experiment in Cold War socialism. What unites all the essays is the question of how the very tensions around "socialist modernity" shaped the views, memories, and actions of East Germans over four decades.

"An impressive volume drawing together rich, diverse essays by some of the most interesting, well-known, and experienced scholars on the GDR in the field, on both sides of the Atlantic."
---Dr. Jan Palmowski, Senior Lecturer in European Studies at King's College London, and Review Editor for German History

"Delving into many sides of the GDR modern, Pence and Betts present both new empirical evidence and offer insightful theoretical perspectives. The idea of the 'Socialist Modern' provides an excellent conceptual framework; the focus on culture fills a hole in the literature, the introduction is theoretically sophisticated and well-grounded in the historiography, and the span and heterogeneity of the articles are impressive."
---Donna Harsch, Associate Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon University

Katherine Pence is Assistant Professor of History, Baruch College, City University of New York.

Paul Betts is Reader in Modern German History, University of Sussex, Brighton, England.

Contributors
Daphne Berdahl
Paul Betts
Alon Confino
Greg Eghigian
Dagmar Herzog
Young-Sun Hong
Thomas Lindenberger
Alf Lüdtke
Ina Merkel
Katherine Pence
Judd Stitziel
Dorothee Wierling

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Stock Characters Speaking
Eight Libanian Declamations Introduced and Translated
Robert Penella
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Declamations were composed and orally delivered in the Roman Empire by sophists, or teachers of rhetoric, of whom the Greek-speaking Libanius was one of the most distinguished. Stock Characters Speaking may be thought of as emerging from three developments of recent decades: an explosive interest in late antiquity, a newly sympathetic interest in rhetoric (including ancient declamation), and a desire to bring Libanius’s massive corpus into English and other modern languages.

In this book, author Robert J. Penella translates eight of Libanius’s declamations: 29, 30, 34, 35, 37, 45, 46, 47, and, in an appendix, the thirteenth-century Gregory of Cyprus’s response to Declamation 34. Each translation is accompanied by an introduction, in which Penella examines the themes, structure, and the stasis, or key issue, of the declamations. Figures who appear in the translated declamations include a parasite who has lost his patron, a man envious of his rich neighbor, a miser’s son, a poor man willing to die for his city, a rich war-hero accused of aiming at tyranny, and a convict asking for exile. Three of these declamations have appeared in German; otherwise, these translations are the first into a modern language.
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Solidarity's Secret
The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland
Shana Penn
University of Michigan Press, 2006
"This important book explores one of the most pivotal periods in Polish history and deals with a topic nearly everyone else overlooked. Shana Penn's study begins with a simple question I wish I had thought more about myself: once the leadership of Solidarity had been arrested during the 1981 military coup, who kept the movement alive over the following months and years? The answer will surprise you, as Penn delves into the lives of seven Polish women activists who rose to the call, set about saving an entire political movement, and in time turned themselves into some of the most powerful women in Poland today."
---Lech Walesa, former President of Poland and winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize


Solidarity's Secret is the first book to record the crucial yet little-known role women played in the rise of an independent press in Poland and in the fall of that country's communist government.

Shana Penn pieces together a decade of interviews with the women behind the Polish pro-democracy movement-women whose massive contributions were obscured by the more public successes of their male counterparts.

Penn reveals the story of how these brave women ran Solidarity and the main opposition newspaper, Tygodnik Mazowsze, while prominent men like Lech Walesa were underground or in jail during the 1980s martial law years. The same women then went on to play influential roles in post-communist Poland.

Solidarity's Secret gives us a richly detailed story-within-a-story-unheard of not only in the West, but until recently even within Poland itself-from one of the most important eras in modern history.
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Worldly Provincialism
German Anthropology in the Age of Empire
H. Glenn Penny
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Worldly Provincialism introduces readers to the intellectual history that drove the emergence of German anthropology. Drawing on the most recent work on the history of the discipline, the contributors rethink the historical and cultural connections between German anthropology, colonialism, and race. By showing that German intellectual traditions differed markedly from those of Western Europe, they challenge the prevalent assumption that Europeans abroad shared a common cultural code and behaved similarly toward non-Europeans. The eloquent and well-informed essays in this volume demonstrate that early German anthropology was fueled by more than a simple colonialist drive. Rather, a wide range of intellectual history shaped the Germans' rich and multifarious interest in the cultures, religions, physiognomy, physiology, and history of non-Europeans, and gave rise to their desire to connect with the wider world.
Furthermore, this volume calls for a more nuanced understanding of Germany's standing in postcolonial studies. In contrast to the prevailing view of German imperialism as a direct precursor to Nazi atrocities, this volume proposes a key insight that goes to the heart of German historiography: There is no clear trajectory to be drawn from the complex ideologies of imperial anthropology to the race science embraced by the Nazis. Instead of relying on a nineteenth-century explanation for twentieth-century crimes, this volume ultimately illuminates German ethnology and anthropology as local phenomena, best approached in terms of their own worldly provincialism.
H. Glenn Penny is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Matti Bunzl Assistant Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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After Django
Making Jazz in Postwar France
Tom Perchard
University of Michigan Press, 2015
How did French musicians and critics interpret jazz—that quintessentially American music—in the mid-twentieth century? How far did players reshape what they learned from records and visitors into more local jazz forms, and how did the music figure in those angry debates that so often suffused French cultural and political life? After Django begins with the famous interwar triumphs of Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt, but, for the first time, the focus here falls on the French jazz practices of the postwar era. The work of important but neglected French musicians such as André Hodeir and Barney Wilen is examined in depth, as are native responses to Americans such as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. The book provides an original intertwining of musical and historical narrative, supported by extensive archival work; in clear and compelling prose, Perchard describes the problematic efforts towards aesthetic assimilation and transformation made by those concerned with jazz in fact and in idea, listening to the music as it sounded in discourses around local identity, art, 1968 radicalism, social democracy, and post colonial politics.
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Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature
Lisa Perfetti
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Exploring literary representations of women's laughter from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, this volume offers an intriguing look into a culture of women's laughter, illustrating the many contexts that shaped the way women told jokes, as well as the ways their joking reflected their limited position in a society dominated by men. The book also considers the uses male authors made of the laughter of their fictional creations and the pleasures offered to both male and female audiences.
This study is the first to investigate women's laughter as a particular kind of "talking back" to medieval discourse on women, the subject of recent feminist medievalist studies. Female characters openly embrace women's laughter, associated with the body and castigated for its unruliness in conduct literature. Acknowledging that comic works were grounded in antifeminist traditions and that their female characters were in fact targets of laughter for male authors, this study argues that female characters who laugh and tell jokes also offer traces of how women might have used their laughter to respond to negative pronouncements about women in medieval culture. Both laughable and laughing, the female protagonists studied in this book will engage modern readers with their witty, sometimes bawdy jokes, allowing us to imagine the pleasures that medieval comic literature, so often labeled misogynous, offered to women as well as to men.
Lisa Perfetti is Assistant Professor of French, Muhlenberg College.
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Double Jeopardy
A Critique of Seven Yüan Courtroom Dramas
Ching-Hsi Perng
University of Michigan Press, 1978
Traditionally, criticism of plays from the Yüan Dynasty (1260–1368) has been dominated by the so-called poetic and socialist schools. Double Jeopardy instead rigorously evaluates a group of plays by aesthetic criteria generated from within the works themselves. It examines seven courtroom plays with special attention to language and the manipulation of dramatic characters—undoubtedly the most reliable indicators of the playwright’s strength and craftsmanship in such a stylized art form as Yüan tsa-chü drama.
The analytical method adopted in Double Jeopardy is textual explication of the conventions of genre and the individual characteristics of each play. The innovation and creative vitality of each playwright emerges through close scrutiny of selected conventional aspects of courtroom dramas: the functions and placement patterns of lyric, verse, and prose as well as the custom of a single singing role and its implication for the presentation of dramatis personae.
Because Yüan drama is driven by conventions, Perng demonstrates a method that can be applied not just to judgment reversal plays but to Yüan dramatic criticism as a whole. In pursuing a method of textual explication, Perng provides a basis on which a larger framework of criticism of Yüan drama may be built.
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Service-Learning
What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know
James Perren
University of Michigan Press, 2021
Service-Learning: What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know gives practical information on implementing service-learning in the field of TESOL. Service-learning⁠—"the accomplishment of tasks that meet genuine human needs in combination with conscious educational growth"⁠—has developed into a pedagogical approach that incorporates student learning and reflection with curricular concepts while partnering with community organizations. Following an overview of service-learning in the field of TESOL, this text includes sections on incorporating service-learning in an ESL course, finding appropriate community partnerships, making decisions about culture- and language-based lessons, assessing students, and making the experience meaningful. Also included are four specific strategies to help readers make the case for service-learning to administrators. 
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Silent Hill
The Terror Engine
Bernard Perron
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, the second of the two inaugural studies in the Landmark Video Games series from series editors Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, is both a close analysis of the first three Silent Hill games and a general look at the whole series. Silent Hill, with its first title released in 1999, is one of the most influential of the horror video game series. Perron situates the games within the survival horror genre, both by looking at the history of the genre and by comparing Silent Hill with such important forerunners as Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil. Taking a transmedia approach and underlining the designer's cinematic and literary influences, he uses the narrative structure; the techniques of imagery, sound, and music employed; the game mechanics; and the fiction, artifact, and gameplay emotions elicited by the games to explore the specific fears survival horror games are designed to provoke and how the experience as a whole has made the Silent Hill series one of the major landmarks of video game history.

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An American Girl, and Her Four Years in a Boys' College
Elisabeth Israels Perry
University of Michigan Press, 2006
In 1870, the University of Michigan-one of the oldest, largest, and most prestigious public universities in the United States-admitted its first woman student. An American Girl, and Her Four Years in a Boys' College, written by one of the first woman graduates from the University of Michigan and published pseudonymously in 1878, describes what it was like to be a member of this tiny group of brave coeds. The story is told through the eyes of Wilhelmine Elliot, an untraditional girl who enrolls at the fictional University of Ortonville, a thinly disguised stand-in for the University of Michigan.

Will's challenges mirror those of other women college students of the era, including the reactions of male faculty and students, relationships with other women students and with family and friends back home, and social attitudes toward the women's movement and liberal religious values. The editors' engaging introduction places the novel in its relevant historical and literary contexts, as do helpful annotations throughout the text.

"The 1870s were an important moment of debate over women's roles and responsibilities. What's here is very interesting not only about higher education, and 'strong-minded women,' but about religion, domesticity, independence, marriage, and homosocial bonding."
--Carol Lasser, Oberlin College

Olive San Louie Anderson (ca. 1852-86) graduated from the University of Michigan in 1875 and published An American Girl in 1878 under the name SOLA. Elisabeth Israels Perry is John Francis Bannon Professor of History, Saint Louis University. Jennifer Ann Price is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Saint Louis University.
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Joy (Or Something Darker, but Like It)
poetry & parenting
Nathaniel Perry
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Joy (Or Something Darker, but Like It), the first book of nonfiction by poet Nathaniel Perry, is a group of essays that considers poetry in the context of parenting—what poems and poets might teach us about parenting, what parenting might teach us about poetry, and also, what either of those things might have to teach us about simply being a relatively successful human being. While other poets have written about parenthood, few books consider how parenthood and poetry themselves intersect. The essays are affable and never technical, but take seriously the idea that thinking about poems might help us all think about our other roles in life, as parents, lovers, citizens, and friends. The book, in the end, imagines that this kind of insight is maybe one of the things most useful about poetry. It isn't, or at least doesn't have to be, always about itself; it can instead, surprisingly and wonderfully, be about us.

Each of the twelve essays considers a different poet—Edward Thomas, Henry W. Longfellow, George Scarbrough, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, Primus St. John, Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, E.A. Robinson, and Belle Randall—and, alongside them, different concerns of parenting and living. Organized in chronological order, they track the growth of Nathaniel Perry’s own children who pop up from time to time in a believable way. Essays consider the idea of devotion and belief, the idea of imperfection, the small details we can focus on as parents, and the conceptions of the world we pass along to our children. Together these essays not only represent the author's personal canon of poets who have been important to him in his life and work, but also present a diverse slice of American poetry, in voice, form, identity, origin, and time period.
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Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex
Race, Madness, Activism
Tony Perucci
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Actor and singer Paul Robeson's performances in Othello, Show Boat, and The Emperor Jones made him famous, but his midcentury appearances in support of causes ranging from labor and civil rights to antilynching and American warmongering made him notorious. When Robeson announced at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference that it was "unthinkable" for blacks to go to war against the Soviet Union, the mainstream American press declared him insane. 
 
Notions of Communism, blackness, and insanity were interchangeably deployed during the Cold War to discount activism such as Robeson's, just a part of an array of social and cultural practices that author Tony Perucci calls the Cold War performance complex. Focusing on two key Robeson performances---the concerts in Peekskill, New York, in 1949 and his appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956---Perucci demonstrates how these performances and the government's response to them are central to understanding the history of Cold War culture in the United States. His book provides a transformative new perspective on how the struggle over the politics of performance in the 1950s was also a domestic struggle over freedom and equality. The book closely examines both of these performance events as well as artifacts from Cold War culture---including congressional documents, FBI files, foreign policy papers, the popular literature on mental illness, and government propaganda films---to study the operation of power and activism in American Cold War culture.

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Keewaydinoquay, Stories from My Youth
Keewaydinoquay Peschel
University of Michigan Press, 2006
In the captivating art of the oral tradition-told in the author's own voice-Keewaydinoquay, Stories from My Youth brings to life the childhood years of a Michigan woman of both Native American and white. Presented here with the clarity and charm of a master storyteller, the words of Keewaydinoquay contain layers of understanding, conveyed by both what is said and how it is said. The values of the worldview that she shares with us are ones that resonate on far more than just an intellectual level.

The stories span generations and cultures and shed a rare light on the living conditions of Native Americans in Michigan in the early 1900s. They recount Keewaydinoquay's education in the public schools, illuminate the role Christianity played in Native American culture, and reveal the importance of maintaining traditional customs.

Keewaydinoquay was one of the very few Native American women who was steeped both in the ancient folkways of her people as well as erudite in the American university system. Ultimately she wove her native tradition and university learning together into a unique perspective that helped people understand the importance of nature and the human spirit.

Keewaydinoquay Peschel was Lecturer of Ethnobotany and Philosophy of the Western Great Lakes Indians at the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of several books, including Blue Berry: First Fruit of the Anishinaabeg. She passed over in 1999. Lee Boisvert attended the University of Michigan as a member of the Residential College from 1967 to 1969, and was awarded a Bachelor in Science in Sociology with double minors in Native American Studies and Gerontology by Central Michigan University in 1993.
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Analysis and Argument in First-Year Writing and Beyond
A Functional Perspective
Silvia Pessoa
University of Michigan Press, 2024
In an increasingly wider range of disciplines college students are expected to write arguments throughout their undergraduate studies. While most instructors know good writing when they see it, they are not always able to articulate the finer details of how language is used to compose the strong arguments they expect from their students. Analysis and Argument in First-Year Writing and Beyond provides a common language to talk about and teach argument writing.

The authors harness over ten years of research on analyzing, scaffolding, and assessing argumentative writing in university classrooms to offer research-based tools for first-year writing and disciplinary instructors to make their expectations explicit to students. To articulate the linguistic resources of argumentation, the authors rely on genre-based pedagogy, informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL). By leveraging their expertise , the authors offer practical tools for scaffolding writing in key genres across broader fields, such as writing studies, business administration, and information systems.

Each chapter focuses on a single tool, explaining it with mentor texts, sample texts, and visualizations, and provides guided classroom activities that teachers can adapt to fit their own contexts. With these tools, instructors and students will better understand how to: 
  • distinguish between descriptive and argumentative writing;
  • write argumentative claims; 
  • apply an analytical framework in a written text; 
  • maintain a consistent position in an argumentative text while incorporating outside sources; 
  • argue for one position in favor of viable alternatives.
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Making Waves
Michigan’s Boat-Building Industry, 1865-2000
Scott M Peters
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Michigan will always be known as the automobile capital of the world, but the Great Lakes State boasts a similarly rich heritage in the development of boat building in America. By the late nineteenth century, Michigan had emerged as the industry’s hub, drawing together the most talented designers, builders, and engine makers to produce some of the fastest and most innovative boats ever created. Within decades, gifted Michigan entrepreneurs like Christopher Columbus Smith, John L. Hacker, and Gar Wood had established some of the nation’s top boat brands and brought the prospect of boat ownership within reach for American consumers from all ranges of income. More than just revolutionizing recreational boating, Michigan boat builders also left their mark on history—from developing the speedy runabouts favored by illicit rum-runners during the Prohibition era to creating the landing craft that carried Allied forces to shores in Europe and the Pacific in WWII. In Making Waves, Scott M. Peters explores this intriguing story of people, processes, and products—of an industry that evolved in Michigan but would change boating across the world.
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African Print Cultures
Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century
Derek Peterson
University of Michigan Press, 2016

The essays collected in African Print Cultures claim African newspapers as subjects of historical and literary study. Newspapers were not only vehicles for anticolonial nationalism. They were also incubators of literary experimentation and networks by which new solidarities came into being. By focusing on the creative work that African editors and contributors did, this volume brings an infrastructure of African public culture into view.

The first of four thematic sections, “African Newspaper Networks,” considers the work that newspaper editors did to relate events within their locality to happenings in far-off places. This work of correlation and juxtaposition made it possible for distant people to see themselves as fellow travellers. “Experiments with Genre” explores how newspapers nurtured the development of new literary genres, such as poetry, realist fiction, photoplays, and travel writing in African languages and in English. “Newspapers and Their Publics” looks at the ways in which African newspapers fostered the creation of new kinds of communities and served as networks for public interaction, political and otherwise. The final section, “Afterlives, ” is about the longue durée of history that newspapers helped to structure, and how, throughout the twentieth century, print allowed contributors to view their writing as material meant for posterity.


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Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China
Glen Douglas Peterson
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Educational pursuits run like a rich thread through the fabric of China's turbulent twentieth century. From the founding of China's first modern school system in the late Qing dynasty through the republican era to the latest educational developments in the People's Republic of China, this book seeks to understand how developments in education contributed to, and were in turn influenced by, cultural patterns and the ongoing search for identity by individuals, collectivities, and states. Its sixteen contributors explore three themes that have enlivened China studies in recent years: sino-foreign interactions, state-society relations, and gender representation and identification.
Unlike most studies of modern Chinese education that focus exclusively on the post-1949 era, Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China represents a deliberate attempt to break through the 1949 barrier and embrace the entire century. Culture emerges in this study as a deeper level factor that underlay the development of education in each period and shaped certain recurrent patterns, while identity involves a search for individual and collective meaning that went on under different regimes.
The product of a genuinely multidisciplinary effort to promote cross-fertilization among an international team of scholars in a wide range of disciplines, Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China will interest students and scholars of modern China, comparative and international education, educational policy, and international relations. It will also appeal to policy makers and professionals associated with international organizations.
Glen Peterson is Associate Professor of History, University of British Columbia. Ruth Hayhoe is Director, Hong Kong Institute of Education. Yongling Lu is a graduate student in the History Department, Stanford University.
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Crisis Bargaining and the State
The Domestic Politics of International Conflict
Susan Peterson
University of Michigan Press, 1996
The first book to systematically explore the importance of domestic institutions to crisis bargaining, Crisis Bargaining and the State argues that the influence of a state's bargaining behavior on its opponents foreign policy depends on the nature of the opposing government--its institutional structures and the strategic beliefs of its leaders. The author shows in three detailed case studies--the Crimean War crisis, the Fashoda crisis, and the Berlin crisis--the significance of domestic factors to questions of war and peace.
Peterson offers a comprehensive analysis of the domestic politics of crisis bargaining. She uses differences in state structure to explain variations in foreign policy processes and outcomes. By introducing domestic structure as a crucial intervening variable between the international environment and a state's foreign policy during an acute conflict, Peterson shows how existing cognitive and bureaucratic approaches provide complementary, not competing, explanations of crisis bargaining.
Crisis Bargaining and the State: The Domestic Politics of International Conflict applies recent research in the field of international political economy on the relationship between ideas, institutions, and the international environment to the issue of crisis bargaining. It will appeal to students, scholars, and policymakers interested in crisis bargaining, international security, and international relations.
Susan Peterson is Assistant Professor, Department of Government, The College of William & Mary.
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The Isthmus of Corinth
Crossroads of the Mediterranean World
David Pettegrew
University of Michigan Press, 2016
The narrow neck of land that joins the Peloponnese with the Greek mainland was central to the fortunes of the city of Corinth and the history of Greece from the classical Greek period to the end of the ancient world. Corinth was perfectly situated for monitoring land traffic between Athens and Sparta and overland movements between eastern and western seas.
 
David Pettegrew’s book offers a new history of the Isthmus of Corinth from the Romans’ initial presence in Greece during the Hellenistic era to the epic transformations of the Empire in late antiquity. A new interpretation of the extensive literary evidence outlines how the Isthmus became the most famous land bridge of the ancient world, central to maritime interests of Corinth, and a medium for Rome’s conquest, annexation, and administration in the Greek east. A fresh synthesis of archaeological evidence and the results of a recent intensive survey on the Isthmus describe the physical development of fortifications, settlements, harbors, roads, and sanctuaries in the region. The author includes chapters on the classical background of the concept isthmos, the sacking of Corinth and the defeat of the Achaean League, colonization in the Late Roman Republic, the Emperor Nero’s canal project and its failure, the growth of Roman settlement in the territory, and the end of athletic contests at Isthmia. The Isthmus of Corinth offers a powerful case study in the ways that shifting Mediterranean worlds transformed a culturally significant landscape over the course of a millennium.
 


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JAPANimals
History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life
Gregory M. Pflugfelder
University of Michigan Press, 2005
From swift steeds to ritually slaughtered deer to symbolic serpents, nonhuman animals of every stripe have participated from the earliest of times in the construction of the cultural community that we know as Japan. Yet the historical accounts that have hitherto prevailed, claim the authors of this innovative volume, relegate our fellow animals to a silent and benign “nature” that lies beyond the realm of narrative and agency. What happens when we restore nonhuman creatures to the field of historical vision?
This book challenges many of the fundamental assumptions that have shaped contemporary scholarship on Japan, engaging from new perspectives questions of economic growth, isolation from and interaction with the outside world, the tools of conquest and empire, and the character of modernity. Essay by essay, this provocative collection compels readers to acknowledge the diversity of living beings who exist at the ragged edges of our human, as well as our historical, horizons.
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Young Sidney Hook
Marxist and Pragmatist
Christopher Phelps
University of Michigan Press, 2005
One of the most controversial figures in the history of American philosophy, Sidney Hook was "an intellectual street fighter" and "probably the greatest polemicist" of the twentieth century (Edward Shils).  Widely known as a Cold War liberal and an intellectual progenitor of neoconservativism, Hook began life as a feisty radical. This now-classic intellectual biography reconstructs Hook's youthful project of fusing American pragmatism and Marxism to create a distinctive approach to philosophy and a politics of revolutionary democratic socialism, carefully charting his interaction with intellectuals such as John Dewey and Max Eastman and his relationship to the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the American Workers Party, and other political currents.


"This book is the best treatment of the best American Marxist philosopher-and the best philosopher to emerge from American slums. Young Sidney Hook is essential reading for anyone interested in democratic theory and practice in America."
---Cornel West

"A very detailed, and fascinating account of Hook's formative years . . . [a] first-rate contribution to the history of American leftist intellectual life."
---Richard Rorty, Raritan

"Fascinating . . . well researched and packed with information."
---Times Literary Supplement

"Succeeds in establishing the young Hook as a dedicated revolutionary Marxist."
---Amos Perlmutter, Washington Times

"A brilliant, lucid portrait of a scholar, adversarial by temperament, who turned his extraordinary powers of analysis and polemic successively against capitalism, Stalinism, and the New Left."
---Alan Wald, Monthly Review

"The best study of Hook's thought. . . . Supersedes all earlier treatments."
---David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, The American Intellectual Tradition

"A major contribution to our understanding of Hook and the American Marxist tradition. . . . Extremely insightful."
---American Studies

"Persuasive. . . . Discovers not just a brilliant interpreter of Marx and the Russian Revolution, but a remarkable advocate and practitioner of the Americanization of Marxism."
---In These Times

"Phelps's effort to uncover, explore, and analyze Hook's forgotten leftism must be judged an unqualified success."
---Left History

"Penetrating, closely argued, and lucid. . . . An important contribution to the history of American radicalism in the 1930s."
---Labor History

One of the most controversial figures in the history of American philosophy, Sidney Hook was "an intellectual street fighter," who began his career as a brilliant Marxist thinker and "probably the greatest polemicist of [the 20th] century" (Edward Shils) before breaking with the Communist Party in the late 1930s. Turning in his later years to an allegiance with American conservatives including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Hook is now widely known as an intellectual father of the neoconservative movement.
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The Law of Ancient Athens
David Phillips
University of Michigan Press, 2013

The Law of Ancient Athens contains the principal literary and epigraphical sources, in English, for Athenian law in the Archaic and Classical periods, from the first known historical trial (late seventh century) to the fall of the democracy in 322 BCE.

This accessible and important volume is designed for teachers, students, and general readers interested in the ancient Greek world, the history of law, and the history of democracy, an Athenian invention during this period. Offering a comprehensive treatment of Athenian law, it assumes no prior knowledge of the subject and is organized in user-friendly fashion, progressing from the person to the family to property and obligations to the gods and to the state. David D. Phillips has translated all sources into English, and he has added significant introductory and explanatory material.

Topics covered in the book include homicide and wounding; theft; marriage, children, and inheritance; citizenship; contracts and commerce; impiety; treason and other offenses against the state; and sexual offenses including rape and prostitution. The volume’s unique feature is its presentation of the actual primary sources for Athenian laws, with many key or disputed terms rendered in transliterated Greek. The translated sources, together with the topical introductions, notes, and references, will facilitate both research in the field and the teaching of increasingly popular courses on Athenian law and law in the ancient world.

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Race, Republicans, and the Return of the Party of Lincoln
Tasha Philpot
University of Michigan Press, 2007

Whether their slogan is “compassionate conservatism” or “hawkish liberalism,” political parties have always sought to expand their electoral coalitions by making minor adjustments to their public image. How do voters respond to these, often short-term, campaign appeals? Race, Republicans, and the Return of the Party of Lincoln is Tasha Philpot’s insightful study of how parties use racial images to shape and reshape the way citizens perceive them.

“Philpot has produced a timely, provocative, and nuanced analysis of political party image change, using the Republican Party’s attempts to recast itself as a party sensitive to issues of race with its 2000, and later 2004, national conventions as case examples. Using a mixture of experiments, focus groups, national surveys, and analyses of major national and black newspaper articles, Philpot finds that if race-related issues are important to individuals, such as blacks, the ability of the party to change its image without changing its political positions is far more difficult than it is among individuals who do not consider race-related issues important, e.g., whites. This book makes a major contribution

to our understanding of party image in general, and political parties’ use of race in particular. Bravo!”

—Paula D. McClain, Duke University

“This book does an excellent job of illuminating the linkages between racial images and partisan support. By highlighting Republican efforts to ‘play against type’ Philpot emphasizes the limits of successfully altering partisan images. That she accomplishes this in the controversial, yet salient, domain of race is no small feat. In short, by focusing on a topical issue, and by adopting a novel theoretical approach, Philpot is poised to make a significant contribution to the literatures on race and party images.”

—Vincent Hutchings, University of Michigan

Tasha S. Philpot is Assistant Professor of Government and African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830
Diane Piccitto
University of Michigan Press, 2023
The Visual Life of Romantic Theater examines the dynamism and vibrancy of stage spectacle and its impact in an era of momentous social upheaval and aesthetic change. Situating theatrical production as key to understanding visuality ca. 1780-1830, this book places the stage front and center in Romantic scholarship by re-envisioning traditional approaches to artistic and social creation in the period. How, it asks, did dramaturgy and stagecraft influence aesthetic and sociopolitical concerns? How does a focus on visuality expand our understanding of the historical experience of theatergoing? In what ways did stage performance converge with visual culture beyond the theater? How did extratheatrical genres engage with theatrical sight and spectacle? Finally, how does a focus on dramatic vision change the way we conceive of Romanticism itself? The volume’s essays by emerging and established scholars provide exciting and suggestive answers to these questions, along with a more capacious conception of Romantic theater as a locus of visual culture that reached well beyond playhouse walls.
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Conflict and Coexistence
Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain
Lucy K Pick
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"An outstanding contribution not only to Spanish but to European history at large. Pick's book is the first to clarify the unity of purpose that drove Archbishop Rodrigo, a major figure not only as a historian and controversialist, but as a churchman whose military campaigns advanced the conquest of Muslim Spain and shifted the whole balance of power in the Iberian peninsula."
---J. N. Hillgarth, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto

"By focusing on the diversified activities of the talented mid-thirteenth-century archbishop of Toledo, Lucy Pick brilliantly illuminates the complex relations between the Christian conquerors of Spain and the conquered Muslim and Jewish populations. Students of medieval Spain, of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, of medieval Muslims and Islam, and of medieval Jews and Judaism will benefit from this excellent study."
---Robert Chazan, New York University.


In Conflict and Coexistence, Lucy Pick sets out to explain how Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived alongside one another in medieval Spain. By examining the life and works of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the Archbishop of Toledo (1209-47), Pick explains that the perceived threat of the non-Christian presence was managed through the subordination of Muslims and Jews.

Rodrigo stood at the center of a transformative period of history in the Iberian peninsula. During his long and varied career as archbishop, he acted as scholar, warrior, builder, and political leader. The wave of victories he helped initiate were instrumental in turning back the tide of Muslim attacks on Christian Spain and restarting the process of Christian territorial conquest. However, Toledo was still a multiethnic city in which Christians lived side by side with Jews and Muslims. As archbishop, he was faced with the considerable challenge of maintaining peace and prosperity in a city where religious passions and intolerance were a constant threat to stability.

This work seeks to examine Rodrigo's relations with the Muslims and Jews of his community both as he idealized them on paper and as he worked through them in real life. Though Rodrigo wrote an anti-Jewish polemic, and set out to conquer Muslim-held lands, he also used scholarly patronage and literary creation to combat internal and external, Christian and non-Christian threats alike. His intended and actual consequences of these varied techniques were to allow Christians, Muslims, and Jews to live together under Christian authority. Rodrigo was bound by practical necessity to find a means of accommodating these groups that was both effective and theologically satisfactory. Throughout this influential work, Pick examines the various aspects of Rodrigo's life and career that led to his policies and the consequences that his work and beliefs brought about in medieval Spain.

This book will be of interest to anyone who studies the history, religion, and literature of medieval Spain, to those interested in the transmission of learning from the Muslim to the Christian world, and to those who study intellectual life and development in medieval Europe.
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The Best of Pickering
Sam Pickering
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Praise for Sam Pickering:

"Pickering has all of Thurber's humor, and he writes as well as E. B. White. He writes with passion, wit, and a strange personal note of self-mockery; he is humanely educated, wise, and capable of a wide range of stylistic effects."
----Jay Parini

". . . he writes in the tradition of Montaigne hammering together a ramshackle affair of surprising nooks, crannies and additions-all under the same roof."
---The Oxford American

"Pickering has the natural essayist's intimate yet distanced take on the world that combines a devotion to particulars . . . with a near-indifference to the status- and achievement-mongering that marks modern life."
---Publishers Weekly

"Pickering writes with the sensitivity and craft of a poet, finding meaning in the commonplace and ordinary."
---Library Journal

"Pickering's genre is unique, but I'm not sure anyone else can write this stuff. I can live with that, as long as Pickering himself continues to wend through the forests, classrooms, airports, billiards championships, hometown parades, and his inner world of Tennessee gags and characters."
---Hartford Courant


His writing is as unique and recognizable as the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Dickinson. Yet most Americans likely know Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor, from the movie Dead Poets Society. In the film, Robin Williams plays an idiosyncratic instructor---based on Pickering---who employs some over-the-top teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning.

Fewer probably know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the author-Sam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters.

The Best of Pickering amply demonstrates Pickering's amazing powers of perception, and gives us insight into the mind of a writer nearly obsessed with turning his back on the conventional trappings of American success-a writer who seems to prefer lying squirrel's-eye-level next to a bed of daffodils in the spring or trespassing on someone else's property to pursue a jaunt through joe-pye weed and goldenrod. Indeed, Pickering's philosophy, at least on paper, may very well be "Now is the only time."

If you haven't met Sam Pickering before, prepare to be surprised and delighted by these wry and sometimes self-deprecating essays that are witty and elegant and concrete yet wander widely, and include Pickering's well-trod fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, full of strange goings-on. This definitive collection of the best of Pickering is a must for Pickering fans and a fine introduction for the uninitiated to one of our greatest men of letters.
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Waltzing the Magpies
A Year in Australia
Sam Pickering
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Praise for Sam Pickering:

"The art of the essay as delivered by Mr. Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble."
---The New York Times Book Review


"Reading Pickering . . . is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend."
---Smithsonian

"What a joy it is to 'mess around' with Professor Sam Pickering!"
---The Chattanooga Times

"Pickering is a barefoot observer of the quotidian who revels in the spectacle and its gift for surprise, prefers the rumpled to the starched, has raised puttering and messing about to an art form, and wrings from it more than a pennyworth of happiness and a life well lived."
---Kirkus Reviews


The movie Dead Poets Society is where most Americans first met Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor. Robin Williams plays the lead character (loosely based on Pickering), an idiosyncratic instructor who employs some over-the-top teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning.

Fewer know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the author-Sam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters. Like the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Emily Dickinson, you can spot Pickering's writing a mile away; there's no mistaking the Pickering pen. As an ample demonstration of the author's literary gifts, Waltzing the Magpies is his unabashedly lush and Technicolor travelogue from Down Under.

On the face of it, Waltzing is the chronicle of a sabbatical year spent with family in Australia. Yet beneath the surface Pickering's big themes-family, nature, seizing the moment-move in a powerful current that frequently bursts out in moments of ecstatic revelation and intense sensual flourish. Through it all Pickering weaves stories from his fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, especially when the goings of the outside world get rough.

Waltzing the Magpies is classic Pickering at the height of his literary powers, and places him in the company of such great American essayists as E. B. White and James Thurber, but with an irony and observational prowess that is pure Pickering.
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Tomorrow Is the Question
New Directions in Experimental Music Studies
Benjamin Piekut
University of Michigan Press, 2014
In recent decades, experimental music has flourished outside of European and American concert halls. The principles of indeterminacy, improvisation, nonmusical sound, and noise, pioneered in concert and on paper by the likes of Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Ornette Coleman, can now be found in all kinds of new places: activist films, rock recordings, and public radio broadcasts, not to mention in avant-garde movements around the world.

The contributors to Tomorrow Is the Question explore these previously unexamined corners of experimental music history, considering topics such as Sonic Youth, Julius Eastman, the Downtown New York pop avant-garde of the 1970s, Fluxus composer Benjamin Patterson, Tokyo’s Music group (aka Group Ongaku), the Balinese avant-garde, the Leicester school of British experimentalists, Cuba’s Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC, Pauline Oliveros’s score for the feminist documentary Maquilapolis, NPR’s 1980s RadioVisions, and the philosophy of experimental musical aesthetics.

Taken together, this menagerie of people, places, and things makes up an actually existing experimentalism that is always partial, compromised, and invented in its local and particular formations—in other words, these individual cases suggest that experimentalism has been a far more variegated set of practices and discourses than previously recognized. Asking new questions leads to researching new materials, new individuals, and new contexts and, eventually, to the new critical paradigms that are necessary to interpret these materials. Gathering contributions from historical musicology, enthnomusicology, history, philosophy, and cultural studies, Tomorrow Is the Question generates future research directions in experimental music studies by way of a productive inquiry that sustains and elaborates critical conversations.
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Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt
Marge Piercy
University of Michigan Press, 1983
Piercy writes of women and poetry and of woman becoming poet
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Brandishing the First Amendment
Commercial Expression in America
Tamara Piety
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Tamara R. Piety argues that increasingly expansive First Amendment protections for commercial speech imperil public health, safety, and welfare; the reliability of commercial and consumer information; the stability of financial markets; and the global environment. Using evidence from public relations and marketing, behavioral economics, psychology, and cognitive studies, she shows how overly permissive extensions of protections to commercial expression limit governmental power to address a broad range of public policy issues.

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DOOM
SCARYDARKFAST
Dan Pinchbeck
University of Michigan Press, 2013

In December 1993, gaming changed forever. id Software's seminal shooter DOOM was released, and it shook the foundations of the medium. Daniel Pinchbeck brings together the complete story of DOOM for the first time.

This book takes a look at the early days of first-person gaming and the video game studio system. It discusses the prototypes and the groundbreaking technology that drove the game forward and offers a detailed analysis of gameplay and level design. Pinchbeck also examines DOOM's contributions to wider gaming culture, such as online multiplay and the modding community, and the first-person gaming genre, focusing on DOOM's status as a foundational title and the development of the genre since 1993. Pinchbeck draws extensively from primary data: from the game itself, from the massive fan culture surrounding the title, and from interviews with the developers who made it. This book is not only the definitive work on DOOM but a snapshot of a period of gaming history, a manifesto for a development ethos, and a celebration of game culture at its best.

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Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia
A Translation and Analysis
Richard Pipes
University of Michigan Press, 2005

Russian history was typically studied through liberal or socialist lenses until Richard Pipes first published his translation of Karamzin's Memoir. Almost fifty years later, it is still the only English-language edition of this classic work. Still fresh and readable today, the Memoir-in which Alexander I's state historian elaborates his arguments for a strong Russian state-remains the most accessible introduction to the conservatism of Russia's ancien regime. This annotated translation is a "faithful rendition of the letter and spirit of the original," which not only introduces readers to the sweep of Karamzin's ideas, but also weaves together a fascinating version of Russia's rich history. With a new foreword by Richard Pipes, Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia is a touchstone for anyone interested in Russia's fascinating and turbulent past.

Richard Pipes is Baird Professor of History at Harvard University.

Nikolai M. Karamzin (1766-1826) was a Russian historian, poet, and journalist. He was appointed court historian by Tsar Alexander I.

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Formative Mesoamerican Exchange Networks with Special Reference to the Valley of Oaxaca
Jane W. Pires-Ferreira
University of Michigan Press, 2019
For this volume, archaeologist Jane W. Pires-Ferreira analyzed artifacts from the Valley of Oaxaca in order to understand more about prehistoric trade patterns in the region. Using her analyses, she was able to describe obsidian exchange networks, iron ore mirror exchange networks, and shell exchange networks in Early and Middle Formative Mesoamerica.
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The Airplane in American Culture
Dominick A. Pisano
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Few journeys have had as great an impact on American culture as Orville Wright's first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903—a twelve-second, one-hundred-twenty-foot trip that has captivated American thought and influenced American life ever since.
Although countless books for aviation buffs have appeared since World War II, none has attempted to place the airplane in its full social, cultural, and interdisciplinary context until now. The first book of its kind, The Airplane in American Culture presents essays by distinguished contributors including historians, literary scholars, scholars of American studies, art historians, and museum professionals that explore a range of topics, including the connections between flying and race and gender; aviation's role in forming perceptions of the landscape; the airplane's significance to the culture of war; and the influence of flight on literature and art.
A must-read collection for anyone fascinated by the airplane, The Airplane in American Culture represents a dramatic new approach to writing the history of aviation, and makes an important contribution to American social and cultural history.
Dominick A. Pisano is Curator of the Aeronautics Department at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
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Writing Ravenna
The Liber Pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus
Joaquin Martinez Pizarro
University of Michigan Press, 1995
The subject of Writing Ravenna is the Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis, composed by Agnellus Andreas, a priest of Ravenna, between 830 and 845 C.E. The Liber Pontificalis has often been studied as a source for ecclesiastical and art history, but hardly ever as a literary creation, in spite of its originality and importance.
Writing Ravenna is an attempt to deal with this work's literary significance and specifically with what it tells us about the creation and circulation of narrative in the Early Middle Ages. The book's first chapter analyzes the ways in which the local and international interests of the Ravenna clergy are reflected in the design, genre, and narrative rhetoric of the Liber. The second chapter characterizes the specific textuality, given that the Liber was composed for oral delivery. The final chapter offers translations of the four most interesting narrative sequences in the Liber, followed by full analyses of sources, narrative technique, and ideological aims.
Writing Ravenna will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars, including art historians, scholars of late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, religious historians, and literary critics.
Joaquin Martinez Pizarro is Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is also the author of A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the Early Middle Ages.
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Assessment Myths
Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching
Lia Plakans
University of Michigan Press, 2015
This volume was conceived as a "best practices" resource for assessment in the way that Vocabulary Myths by Keith S. Folse is one for reading and vocabulary teachers. Like others in the Myths series, this book combines research with good pedagogical practices.
 
The book opens with an introduction that reviews many key assessment terms and concepts.
 
The myths examined in this book are:
  • Assessment is just writing tests and using statistics.
  • A comprehensive final exam is the best way to evaluate students.
  • Scores on performance assessments are preferable because of their accuracy and authenticity.
  • Multiple choice tests are inaccurate measures of language but are easy to write.
  • We should test only one skill at a time.
  • A test’s validity can be determined by looking at it.
  • Issues of fairness are not a concern with standardized testing.
  • Teachers should never be involved in preparing students for tests.
Implications for teaching and an agenda for research are discussed in a conclusion. 
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Principles of Corporate Renewal
Harlan D. Platt
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Since its publication in 1998, this indispensable text has been the only systematic examination of corporate renewal, offering a rational approach for dealing with financially distressed companies. It contains the first logical and orderly discussion of a number of modern business issues including outsourcing, turnaround management, layoffs, quality management, and reengineering.
 
Now in its third edition, Harlan D. Platt has revised, updated, and expanded the text. As the first edition did, this new Principles of Corporate Renewal cuts to the heart of the patterns, procedures, and pitfalls of bringing a corporation back to life and health. New and exciting materials in this edition include factors to consider on the first day of a turnaround assignment and essential turnaround questions that help assess and focus the turnaround effort. This is a highly readable book on a fairly complex topic. 
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front cover of Principles of Corporate Renewal, Second Edition
Principles of Corporate Renewal, Second Edition
Harlan D. Platt
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Since its publication in 1998, this indispensable text has been the only systematic examination of corporate renewal, offering a rational approach for dealing with financially distressed companies. It contains the first logical and orderly discussion of a number of modern business issues including outsourcing, turnaround management, layoffs, quality management, and reengineering.
 
Now in its second edition, Harlan D. Platt has revised, updated, and expanded the text to include a new chapter on bankruptcy law, a profile of the turnaround manager, and an overview of the typical turnaround engagement. As the first edition did, this new Principles of Corporate Renewal cuts to the heart of the patterns, procedures, and pitfalls of bringing a corporation back to life and health.
[more]


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