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The Giant’s Rival
The USSR and Latin America, Revised Edition
Cole Blasier
University of Pittsburgh Press
The Giant's Rival is an authoritative survey of Soviet relations with Latin America. Blasier provides a concise account of Soviet diplomatic, economic, and political-military involvement in the region, focusing on the post-1970 period.

This revised edition includes chapters analyzing developments since 1983. Blasier views the origins of the Sandinista revolution, and its relation to international Communism, and how the Nicaraguan government has grown dependent on Soviet oil, arms, and economic and political assistance.  He also describes the growing relations between the New Jewel Movement in Grenada and Moscow before it was toppled by the U.S. invasion. Blasier explains how U.S. policies have affected Soviet outcomes and makes proposals for protecting and advancing U.S. interests.
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The Hovering Giant (Revised Edition)
U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America, 1910–1985
Cole Blasier
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985

In the first edition of The Hovering Giant, Cole Blasier analyzed U.S. response to revolutions in Latin America from Madero in Mexico to Allende in Chile.  He explained why U.S. leaders sponsored paramilitary units to overthrow revolutionary governments in Guatemala and Cuba and compromised their own differences with revolutionary governments in Mexico and Bolivia.  The protection of private U.S. interests was part of the explanation, but Blasier gave greater emphasis to rivalry with Germany or the Soviet Union.

Now in this revised edition, Blasier also examines the responses of the Carter and Reagan administrations to the Grenadian and Nicaraguan revolutions and the revolt in El Salvador.  He also brings up to date the interpretation of U.S.-Cuban relations.

Blasier stresses U.S. defense of its preeminent position in the Caribean Basin, as well as rivalry with the Soviet Union, to explain these later U.S. responses.  Seemingly unaware of historical experience, Washington followed patterns in Central America and Grenada similar to earlier patterns in Guatemala, Cuba, and Chile even though the latter had adverse effects on U.S. security and economic interests.

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Cuba in the World
Cole Blasier
University of Pittsburgh Press
Since the 1970s, Cuba has greatly expanded its participation in world affairs. What changes in its leadership, economy, and armed forces explain this increased participation? How do Cuban ties with Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Africa, Israel, and the socialist countries reveal Cuban purposes and affect U.S.-Cuban rapprochement? Cuba in the World addresses these and other important questions in the most comprehensive and authoritative review of Cuban foreign policies since the Revolution.
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Careers in City Politics
The Case for Urban Democracy
Timothy Bledsoe
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993
Careers in City Politics provides an in-depth view of the vital aspects of local politics-access to political office, individual office holder's accountability to the public, the performance of councils as collective political bodies, and the often high turnover of personnel.

Timothy Bledsoe bases his findings on the political careers of more than eight-hundred city council members representing cities with large and medium populations. Tracing how some officials' careers unfolded over five years, Bledsoe studies their reasons for seeking office and examines how successful they were in adapting to their jobs. He evaluates office-holders whose council careers were cut short and those whose lengthy service qualified them as “careerists,” paying special attention to first-term officials and to those who used their seats as stepping-stones to higher political offices. In this first-of-its-kind study, Bledsoe offers specific recommendations for restoring some of the lost vigor to local politics.
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Destination Known
Brett Ellen Block
University of Pittsburgh Press
Winner of the 2001 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Selected by C. Michael Curtis

The characters in Brett Ellen Block’s debut collection of short stories may know their destinations, but they don’t always rush to them. From a runaway on an ice cream truck to a down-and-out retiree in a porn shop, they struggle to face both their pasts and their futures.

In a series of tightly focused and deftly drawn vignettes, Block explores the detours, potholes, and speed bumps along the road of life. These are stories about people at loose ends in their lives, coming to the realization that they can’t always sit back and enjoy the ride. Whether they’re committing petty larceny, moping their way through the winding streets and canals of Venice, or seeking to escape North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Block’s characters are learning to get behind the wheel and take control.
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The Intimate Act Of Choreography
Lynne Anne Blom
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982

A comprehensive book that covers all aspects of choreography from the most fundamental techniques to highly sophisticated artistic concerns.  The Intimate Act of Choreography presents the what and how of choreography in a workable format that begins with basics- - time, space, force -- and moves on to the more complex issues faced by the intermediate and advanced choreographer -- form, style, abstraction, compositional structures, and choreographic devices.

The format of the book evolved from the idea that improvisation is a good way to learn choreography.  This approach is in harmony with widely accepted dance philosophies that value the unique quality of each individual’s creativity.  After discussing a concept, the authors provide improvisations, and choreographic studies that give the student a physical experience of that concept.  The language is stimulating an innovative, rich in visual images that will challenge the choreographer to explore new directions in movement.

The book is for serious dance students and professionals who are interested in both the practical and theoretical aspects of the art, dancers who are just starting to choreograph, and teachers who are seeking fresh ideas and new approaches to use with young choreographers.  (A Teacher’s Addendum offers suggestions on how to use the material in the classroom.)  It is a guide, a text, and an extensive resource of every choreographic concept central to the art form.

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The Moment Of Movement
Dance Improvisation
Lynne Anne Blom
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988

Dance improvisation, the intriguing phenomenon of the creative process alive in the moving body, exists powerfully, sublimely - lending insight, solving problems, allowing moments of transcendence, diversion, and delight.  Flourishing especially since the postmodern movement of the 1960s, it has come into its own in the performing arts.  While there are many books containing ideas for developing improvisations, few have tackled the difficult questions: “What is dance improvisation?”  “How does it work?” or “What is its body of knowledge?”

The Moment of Movement goes beyond lists of improvisations and into the heart of improvising.  As in their previous book, The Intimate Act of Choreography, the authors pursue both the philosophical and the practical.  They begin by examining the creative process as it applies to movement and especially the kinesthetic way in which the body knows and uses movement.  They answer the often unstated and pertinent questions of the novice; investigate the particular skills and traits needed by the leader; consider ways of working with specific populations; and provide challenging material for advanced movers.  They discuss the use of music, and the specific situation of improvisation in performance.  For leaders who want to design their own improvisations, they trace the evolution of an idea into an actual content and structure.  They also address the controversial issue of the legitimacy of improvisation in an academic curriculum.  A final chapter presents hundreds of improvs and improv ideas, grouped into units and cross-referenced.

The Moment of Movement is not tied to any one point of view.  The authors’ presentation of a broad range of material is flexible enough for use by choreographers, directors, educators, and therapists.  In its perceptive investigation of the experiential and conceptual aspects of dance improvisation, this book articulates the ephemeral.

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About Three Bricks Shy
And The Load Filled Up
Roy Blount Jr
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004
Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

Any number of writers could spend an entire season with an NFL team, from the first day of training camp until the last pick of the draft, and come up with an interesting book. But only Roy Blount Jr. could capture the pain, the joy, the fears, the humor—in short, the heart—of a championship team.

In 1973, the Pittsburgh Steelers were super, but missed the bowl. Blount’s portrait of a team poised to dominate the NFL for more than a decade recounts the gridiron accomplishments and off-the-field lives of players, coaches, wives, fans, and owners. About Three Bricks Shy . . . is considered a classic; Sports Illustrated recently named it one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time. This thirtieth-anniversary edition includes additional chapters on the Steelers’ Super Bowl wins, written for the 1989 paperback, as well as a new introduction by the author.
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Leaping Poetry
An Idea with Poems and Translations
Robert Bly
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008
Leaping Poetry is Robert Bly's testament to the singular importance of the artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought in any great work of art; the process that Bly refers to as “riding on dragons.” Originally published in 1972 in Bly's literary journal The Seventies, Leaping Poetry is part anthology and part commentary, wherein Bly seeks to rejuvenate modern Western poetry through his revelations of “leaping” as found in the works of poets from around the world, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Chu Yuan, Tomas Tranströmer, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, while also outlining the basic principles that shape his own poetry. Bly seeks the use of quick, free association of the known and the unknown-the innate animal and rational cognition-which, he maintains, have been kept apart in the development of Western religious, intellectual, and literary thought.
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Hegemony Constrained
Evasion, Modification, and Resistance to American Foreign Policy
Davis B. Bobrow
University of Pittsburgh Press
In the post-cold war era, the United States has risen to a position of unprecedented dominance in the world and has often pursued a primarily unilateral approach to international policy issues. Hegemony Constrained examines how nations, ethnic and religious groups, and international organizations cope with American hegemony. The chapters reveal the various ways in which foreign actors attempt and sometimes succeed in keeping official Washington from achieving its preferred outcomes.
An international group of contributors considers how and why a variety of foreigners act strategically to avoid, delay, or change American policy with respect to a broad range of issues in world affairs. Individual chapters analyze the Kurds and Shia in Iraq; the governments of China, Japan, Turkey, and Germany; the G-7; liberalizing the international economy; coping with global warming; regulating harmful tax competition; controlling missile proliferation; limiting public health damage from tobacco; and international public opinion bearing on the politics of responding to a hegemonic America. 
By recognizing and illustrating moves that challenge American unilateralism, Hegemony Constrained provides a framework for understanding and anticipating the goals, motives, and means others in the world bring to their dealings with American hegemony in specific situations. Thus, it offers a corrective to naively optimistic unilateralism and naively optimistic multilateralism.
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Policy Analysis by Design
Davis Bobrow
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987
Policy Analysis by Design examines the approaches to public policy taken by those who try to teach it, write about it, and influence it through major analysis.  Bobrow and Dryzek systematically compare the five major contending analytical frames of reference: welfare economics, public choice, social structure, information processing, and political philosophy.  The workings of each frame are illustrated by means of a common, if imaginary, policy case - air pollution in the hypothetical Smoke Valley.
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Claiming Brazil
Performances of Citizenship in the Centenary of Independence
Gregg Bocketti
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Brazil marked its centennial as an independent country in 1922. Claiming Brazil explores how Brazilians from different walks of life commemorated the event, and how this led to conflicting ideas of national identity. Civic rituals hold enormous significance, and Brazilian citizens, immigrants, and visitors employed them to articulate and perform their sense of what Brazil was, stood for, and could be. Gregg Bocketti argues that these celebrations, rather than uniting the country, highlighted tensions between modernity and tradition, over race and ethnicity, and between nation and region. Further, the rituals contributed to the collapse of the country’s social and political status quo and gave substance to the debates and ideas that characterized Brazilian life in the 1920s and then under the transformative rule of Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945). Now, at the bicentennial of Brazil’s independence, which itself unfolds in a period of political crisis and economic dislocation, and in the aftermath of several large civic events, it is an opportune moment to consider how Brazilians used civic rituals to engage with questions of identity, belonging, and citizenship one hundred years ago.

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Steelton
Immigration and Industrialization, 1870–1940
John Bodnar
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990
A study of the immigrants who flocked to this Central Pennsylvania steel town in the late nineteenth century in search of employment. Comprised primarily of Southern blacks and Eastern European immigrants, they formed the lower class of this town. Analyzes the social structure and dominance of the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite.
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Anxious Times
Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Amelia Bonea
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or “diseases of modernity” resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various “neurotic remedies,” in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions.

Anxious Times examines perceptions of the pressures of modern life and their impact on bodily and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain. The authors explore anxieties stemming from the potentially harmful impact of new technologies, changing work and leisure practices, and evolving cultural pressures and expectations within rapidly changing external environments. Their work reveals how an earlier age confronted the challenges of seemingly unprecedented change, and diagnosed transformations in both the culture of the era and the life of the mind.
 

[more]

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Tough on Crime
The Rise of Punitive Populism in Latin America
Michelle D. Bonner
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Crime and insecurity are top public policy concerns in Latin America. Political leaders offer tough-on-crime solutions that include increased policing and punishments, and decreased civilian oversight. These solutions, while apparently supported by public opinion, sit in opposition to both criminological research on crime control and human rights commitments. Moreover, many political and civil society actors disagree with such rhetoric and policies. In Tough on Crime, Bonner explores why some voices and some constructions of public opinion come to dominate public debate. Drawing on a comparative analysis of Argentina and Chile, based on over 190 in-depth interviews, and engaging the Euro-American literature on punitive populism, this book argues that a neoliberal media system and the resulting everyday practices used by journalists, state, and civil actors are central to explaining the dominance of tough-on-crime discourse.
 
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Cuba, Castro, and the United States
Philip W. Bonsal
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971
Bonsal combines his memoirs of his experiences in Havana with an analysis of the relationship between Cuba and the United States both during the Batista and Castro regimes and during the earlier history of the Cuban Republic.

His discussion of Castro's personality is incisive, portraying the Maximum Leader's increasing animosity toward the United States until the final break-off of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Bonsal's observations of Castro and the sociopolitical climate in Cuba are perhaps the most incisive and accurate of any to date on the subject.

All the events from the Revolution to the termination of diplomatic relations are discussed. Of particular interest are Bonsal's accounts of his attempt to find a basis for a rational relationship between the United States and Castro's Revolution, the rejection of that attempt by Castro, and the abandonment by Washington of the policy of nonintervention in Cuban affairs which the Ambassador had advocated.

Finally, in an evaluation of future relations between the two countries, Bonsal analyzes some of the major problems of the coming years.
[more]

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Appalachian Autumn
Marcia Bonta
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994
Appalachian Autumn chronicles the beauties of the fall months, small and large. But Marcia Bonta’s quiet mountaintop life is shattered by a lumberman who clear-cuts a neighboring property. The massive bulldozers and skidders crush every tree and shrub, weed, and wildflower, leaving only rubble in their wake. Fleeing from the whine of chain saws and the crash of falling trees, she roams the mountain, watching wild turkeys forage in the field, flocks of migrating birds feast on wild grapes, and does and bucks eye each other in their mating ritual. “Autumn is a bittersweet time,” Bonta writes, “a season of good-byes, when, after the flaming leaves fall and start the inevitable process of decay, we are left with only the bare bones of nature.” If we are not careful, she warns, there may come a day when autumn’s dusk and winter’s night no longer lead into spring’s morning. 
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Appalachian Spring
Marcia Bonta
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991

Marcia Bonta is a naturalist-writer who has lived for decades on a five-hundred-acre mountaintop farm in Central Pennsylvania. In Appalachian Spring, the intricacies of the season unravel day by day in journal entries that combine Bonta’s own meticulous observations with the research reported by botanists, entomologists, and other natural scientists.

Every aspect of the natural world catches her eye, from the life cycle of a tent caterpillar to the sex life of jack-in-the pulpit. She hopes, by recounting such wonders, to convert others to what she calls the “third stage” in humanity’s relationship with nature, that of empathy with all of nature for its own sake: “To know the earth better, to grasp a little of its workings, to look on it with awe and wonder as well as with respect, is to want to save it from destruction.”


 
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Appalachian Summer
Marcia Bonta
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999
In Appalachian Summer, Marcia Bonta offers a day-by-day account of summer’s budding, blossoming, and fading on her 650-acre property in south-central Pennsylvania. During this summer, the author’s first grandchild grows alongside the forest animals that populate the mountain. A local girl disappears, and while searchers comb the mountain for her, Bonta poses questions about women’s safety in the woods and why they might hesitate to hike or camp on their own. Undeterred, she continues her meandering daily walks around her forested home, making minute observations of this one place in this one season, ultimately laying bare the undeniable connections we retain to the natural world—which is, after all, our own. 
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Appalachian Winter
Marcia Bonta
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005
Winter is the season that most tests our mettle. The psychological burdens of waiting for spring under gray skies compound the challenges of freezing rain, wind chill, deep snow, and dangerous ice. Despite winter’s harshness, there is plenty of beauty and life in the woods if only we know where to look. The stark, white landscape sparkles in the sunshine and glows beneath the moon on crisp, clear nights; bare branches make it easy to see long distances; birds flock to feeders; and animals—even those that should be hibernating—make surprise visits from time to time. Appalachian Winter offers acclaimed naturalist Marcia Bonta’s account of one season as experienced on and around her 650-acre home on the westernmost ridge of the hill-and-valley landscape that dominates central Pennsylvania.
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Lake Michigan
Daniel Borzutzky
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Finalist for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize

From the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award for poetry


Lake Michigan, a series of 19 lyric poems, imagines a prison camp located on the beaches of a Chicago that is privatized, racially segregated, and overrun by a brutal police force. Thinking about the ways in which economic policy, racism, and militarized policing combine to shape the city, Lake Michigan's poems continue exploring the themes from Borzutzky's Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. But while the influences in this book (Césaire, Vallejo, Neruda) are international, the focus here is local as the book takes a hard look at neoliberal urbanism in the historic city of Chicago.  Named a 2018 Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library. 
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Pesticides And Politics
The Life Cycle of a Public Issue
Christopher J. Bosso
University of Pittsburgh Press

Winner of the 1988 Policy Studies Organization Book Award 

Among the more dramatic changes brought by World War II was the widespread introduction of new synthetic chemical pesticides - products welcomed as technological answers to a whole host of agricultural problems.  The dangers posed by these products were often ignored in the rush to get them onto the market.  Federal policy primarily reflected the interests of those promoting the new technologies.  The risks associated with pesticides, as yet ill-understood, continued to be played down during the 1950s, despite their sudden emergence as a public problem as a result of health scares and fish and wildlife deaths following massive pest eradication campaigns.  These events, together with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, spawned the environmental movement of the 1960s.

Dramatic changes came in the early 1970s as environmental values permeated the institutions and dynamics of American politics.  Such changes produced new priorities, and - in part - a redirection in federal policy on chemical pesticides.  The National Environmental Policy Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, congressional reforms, and broad popular support opened opportunities for those seeking to alter pesticides policy.  But by the mid-1980s, after more than a decade of conflict, that policy is in limbo, caught between powerful environmental, economic, and political forces.

How did this happen?

Pesticides and Politics traces the long battle over control of pesticides through an analytical framework that is at the same time historical, comparative, and theoretical.  Christopher J. Bosso’s account analyzes the responses to this complex problem by commercial interests, government, the media, and the public, and shows how the issue evolved over forty years of technological and political change.

Bosso’s research leads to a number of insights about the U.S. structure of governance.  It shows how the system itself determines who gains access to decision making and who is excluded, and how conflicts are redefined as the range of interests attached to them grows.  Bosso concludes that for fundamental institutional reasons, as well as political ones, federal pesticides policy lies stalled and impotent in the mid-1980s.

Relying heavily on government documents, the sizable literature on environmental politics, and interviews with relevant policy actors, Pesticides and Politics will enlighten students of the public policy process, and also be useful in courses in policy making and policy analysis.

[more]

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The State and Insurrection
New Interventions in Latin American Marxist Theory
Bruno Bosteels
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
Claims that students are too sensitive are familiar on and around college campuses. The ideas of cancel culture, safe spaces, and political correctness are used to shut down discussion and prevent students from being recognized as stakeholders in higher education and as advocates for their own interests. Further, universities can claim that student activists threaten academic freedom. In Sensitive Rhetorics, Kendall Gerdes puts these claims and common beliefs into conversation with rhetorical theory to argue that critiques of sensitivity reveal a deep societal discomfort with the idea that language is a form of action. Gerdes poses important questions: What kind of harm can language and representation actually do, and how? What responsibilities do college and university teachers bear toward their students? Sensitive Rhetorics explores the answers by surfacing submerged assumptions about higher education, the role of instructors and faculty, and the needs of an increasingly diverse student body. 
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The Source of Life and Other Stories
Beth Bosworth
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012
From “The Eight Rhetorical Mode”
Later he asked, “Would you like to go for a hike sometime?” and two trains of thought left the station: He means to get to know me and we might leave the city together and it’s been a long time since I climbed a mountain. That train chugged into a wider brighter country all the time. The other train went by another route through the panicked interior. He’s a lunatic, it whistled. He’s been in and out of hospitals. He will take you to a mountaintop and throw you right off into the bright air: choo choo!

Post-divorce dating is one more cause for celebration (or a quick call in to the police) in Beth Bosworth’s revelatory new book, The Source of Life and Other Stories. The spine of this collection is a series of linked stories about Ruth Stein, a Brooklyn author whose first book has exposed her father’s abuses; while the voice here, speaking across a lifetime, ranges from bittersweet to humorous to lethal. In other stories Bosworth’s narrators—a mother left to care for her son’s suicidal dog, an editor haunted by a dog-eared manuscript—seem to grab hold of the reins and run off with their fates. Meanwhile Bosworth explores the extended family, the bonds of friendship, an apocalyptic Vermont, the rank yet redeemable Gowanus Canal; also rites of passage, race relations, divorce, middle-aged romance, dementia, funerals, alcoholism, and the Jewish religion. Reality is just another stumbling block for Bosworth’s characters, who might help themselves but don’t always choose to. There are leaps of faith here, nonetheless, as the collection dispenses a kind of narrative psychotropic for survival and redemption, with a chaser of humor mixed in.
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Earnest, Earnest?
Poems
Eleanor Boudreau
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Winner, Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Finalist, 2021 Eric Hoffer Award
Silver Medal, 2020 Florida Book Award
 
In Earnest, Earnest?, the speaker, Eleanor, writes postcards to her on-again-off-again lover, Earnest. The fact that her lover’s name is Earnest and that their relationship is fraught, raises questions of sincerity and irony, and whether both can be present at the same time. While Earnest can be read literally as Eleanor’s lover, he is best understood as another side of the poet’s self. The ambiguity at play in Earnest, Earnest? is embodied in the form of the “Earnest Postcards” that structure the book—these postcards are experimental in their use of images and formal in their dialogue with the sonnet. Thus, Earnest, Earnest? is a question of tone, address, and form.
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Love, Order, and Progress
The Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Auguste Comte
Michel Bourdeau
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Auguste Comte's doctrine of positivism was both a philosophy of science and a political philosophy designed to organize a new, secular, stable society based on positive or scientific, ideas, rather than the theological dogmas and metaphysical speculations associated with the ancien regime. This volume offers the most comprehensive English-language overview of Auguste Comte's philosophy, the relation of his work to the sciences of his day, and the extensive, continuing impact of his thinking on philosophy and especially secular political movements in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Contributors consider Comte’s reasons for establishing a Religion of Humanity as well as his views on domestic life and the arts in his positivist utopia. The volume further details Comte's attempt to apply his "positive method," first to social science and then to politics and morality, thereby defending the continuity of his career while also critically examining the limits of his approach.
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Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres
Tracey Bowen
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013
A student’s avatar navigates a virtual world and communicates the desires, emotions, and fears of its creator. Yet, how can her writing instructor interpret this form
of meaningmaking?

Today, multiple modes of communication and information technology are challenging pedagogies in composition and across the disciplines. Writing instructors grapple with incorporating new forms into their curriculums and relating them to established literary practices. Administrators confront the application of new technologies to the restructuring of courses and the classroom itself.

Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres examines the possibilities, challenges, and realities of mutimodal composition as an effective means of communication. The chapters view the ways that writing instructors and their students are exploring the spaces where communication occurs, while also asking “what else is possible.” The genres of film, audio, photography, graphics, speeches, storyboards, PowerPoint presentations, virtual environments, written works, and others are investigated to discern both their capabilities and limitations. The contributors highlight the responsibility of instructors to guide students in the consideration of their audience and ethical responsibility, while also maintaining the ability to “speak well.” Additionally, they focus on the need for programmatic changes and a shift in institutional philosophy to close a possible “digital divide” and remain relevant in digital and global economies.

    Embracing and advancing multimodal communication is essential to both higher education and students. The contributors therefore call for the examination of how writing programs, faculty, and administrators are responding to change, and how the many purposes writing serves can effectively converge within composition curricula.
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Ida Tarbell
Portrait of a Muckraker
Kathleen Brady
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989
In this first definitive biography of Ida Tarbell, Kathleen Brady has written a readable and widely acclaimed book about one of America’s great journalists.

Ida Tarbell’s generation called her “a muckraker” (the term was Theodore Roosevelt’s, and he didn’t intend it as a compliment), but in our time she would have been known as “an investigative reporter,” with the celebrity of Woodward and Bernstein. By any description, Ida Tarbell was one of the most powerful women of her time in the United States: admired, feared, hated. When her History of the Standard Oil Company was published, first in McClure’s Magazine and then as a book (1904), it shook the Rockefeller interests, caused national outrage, and led the Supreme Court to fragment the giant monopoly.

A journalist of extraordinary intelligence, accuracy, and courage, she was also the author of the influential and popular books on Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, and her hundreds of articles dealt with public figures such as Louis Pateur and Emile Zola, and contemporary issues such as tariff policy and labor.  During her long life, she knew Teddy  Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Henry James, Samuel McClure, Lincoln Stephens, Herbert Hoover, and many other prominent Americans. She achieved more than almost any woman of her generation, but she was an antisuffragist, believing that the traditional roles of wife and mother were more important than public life. She ultimately defended the business interests she had once attacked.

To this day, her opposition to women’s rights disturbs some feminists. Kathleen Brady writes of her: “[She did not have] the flinty stuff of which the cutting edge of any revolution is made. . . . Yet she was called to achievement in a day when women were called only to exist.  Her triumph was that she succeeded. Her tragedy ws that she was never to know it.”
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Song of the Forest
Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–1953
Stephen Brain
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011

The Soviets are often viewed as insatiable industrialists who saw nature as a force to be tamed and exploited. Song of the Forest counters this assumption, uncovering significant evidence of Soviet conservation efforts in forestry, particularly under Josef Stalin. In his compelling study, Stephen Brain profiles the leading Soviet-era conservationists, agencies, and administrators, and their efforts to formulate forest policy despite powerful ideological differences.
      By the time of the revolution of 1905, modern Russian forestry science had developed an influential romantic strand, especially prevalent in the work of Georgii Morozov, whose theory of “stand types” asked forest managers to consider native species and local conditions when devising plans for regenerating forests. After their rise to power, the Bolsheviks turned their backs on this tradition and adopted German methods, then considered the most advanced in the world, for clear-cutting and replanting of marketable tree types in “artificial forests.” Later, when Stalin’s Five Year Plan required vast amounts of timber for industrialization, forest radicals proposed “flying management,” an exaggerated version of German forestry where large tracts of virgin forest would be clear-cut. Opponents who still upheld Morozov’s vision favored a conservative regenerating approach, and ultimately triumphed by establishing the world’s largest forest preserve.
      Another radical turn came with the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature, implemented in 1948. Narrow “belts” of new forest planted on the vast Russian steppe would block drying winds, provide cool temperatures, trap moisture, and increase crop production. Unfortunately, planters were ordered to follow the misguided methods of the notorious Trofim Lysenko, and the resulting yields were abysmal. But despite Lysenko, agency infighting, and an indifferent peasant workforce, Stalin’s forestry bureaus eventually succeeded in winning many environmental concessions from industrial interests. In addition, the visionary teachings of Morozov found new life, ensuring that the forest’s song did not fall upon deaf ears.

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Herbert Hoover and Economic Diplomacy
Department of Commerce Policy, 1921-1928
Joseph Brandes
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970
From 1921 to 1928, future president Hoover built the Commerce Department into one of the most influential forces in federal government. During this time, the United States became a major creditor to other nations, which in turn had a significant impact on power relations between nations. The Commerce Department also became a champion of American economic rights and independence from foreign commodities, and in the process became the guiding force in national economic policy.
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Pennsylvania Constitutional Development
Rosalind L. Branning
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

Pennsylvania Constitutional Development has proven to be the definitive study of the history of Pennsylvania's constitution in its first four incarnations. Rosalind Branning's critique, first published in 1960, reflects the movement that led to the constitution of 1968. After tracing the history of the 1776 constitution and its earliest revisions--in 1790 and 1838--Branning primarily focuses on the constitutional convention of 1872-73 and the resulting document of 1874, which endured for almost a century. She uses the published <I>Debates</I>, newspaper files, and the observations of contemporary writers and statesmen to provide a detailed and engaging study of the politics and leadership of the time. Her analysis demonstrates that this constitutional convention produced an instrument that was designed to meet nineteenth-century needs but would need significant revisions by future generations. Foreseeing the very issues that would be addressed in the 1967-68 constitutional convention, Branning identifies the elements that are necessary for successful constitutional lawmaking.

The evolution of Pennsylvania's body of laws serves as a cogent example of the opportunities and foibles intrinsic to the process of defining effective governance of a state. Pennsylvania Constitutional Development remains an essential resource for students and historians, and should be read by anyone interested in the government of the Keystone State.

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A Man Who Loved the Stars
The Autobiography of John A. Brashear
John A. Brashear
University of Pittsburgh Press
The inspiring story of a man whose avocation as a stargazer and vocation as a millwright led to his development of lenses, mirrors and other astronomical apparatus. John A. Brashear's technological advances were later employed by astronomers in the United States and Europe.  Brashear also attracted the friendship and financial support of astronomer Samuel Lagley, railroad magnate William Thaw, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Carnegie, who gave him $20,000 for the construction of Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh. The inspiring story of a man whose avocation as a stargazer and vocation as a millwright led to his development of lenses, mirrors and other astronomical apparatus. John A. Brashear's technological advances were later employed by astronomers in the United States and Europe.  Brashear also attracted the friendship and financial support of astronomer Samuel Lagley, railroad magnate William Thaw, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Carnegie, who gave him $20,000 for the construction of Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh.
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The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925
A Documentary History
John C. Brereton
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
This volume describes the formative years of English composition courses in college through a study of the most prominent documents of the time: magazine articles, scholarly reports, early textbooks, teachers' testimonies-and some of the actual student papers that provoked discussion. Includes writings by leading scholars of the era such as Adams Sherman Hill, Gertrude Buck, William Edward Mead, Lane Cooper, William Lyon Phelps, and Fred Newton Scott.
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Eurasian Environments
Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History
Nicholas Breyfogle
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia, specifically examining steppe environments, hydraulic engineering, soil and forestry, water pollution, fishing, and the interaction of the environment and disease vectors. Throughout, the authors place the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a trans-chronological, comparative context, seamlessly linking the local and the global. The chapters are rooted in the ecological and geological specificities of place and community while unveiling the broad patterns of human-nature relationships across the planet. Eurasian Environments brings together an international group scholars working on issues of tsarist/Soviet environmental history in an effort to showcase the wave of fascinating and field-changing research currently being written. 
 
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The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company
A Romance of Millions
James Howard Bridge
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992
“For years I have been convinced that there is not an honest bone in your body. Now I know that you are a god-damned thief,” Henry Clay Frick reportedly told Andrew Carnegie at their last meeting in 1900, just before J. P. Morgan bought the Carnegie Steel Company and founded United States Steel.

Three years later, James Bridge, who had served as Carnegie's personal secretary, published this book. In it he recounted the events that led up to the final confrontation between two of America's most powerful capitalists. The book created a sensation when it appeared in 1903. Not only did it describe the raw emotions of Carnegie and Frick, those most brilliant and uneasy of business partners, it also told of the history and inner workings of the industrial giant, Carnegie Steel.

Bridge was an open partisan of Frick, and the portrait of Carnegie that emerges from this book is not flattering. But he was an experienced journalist, and he uses sources carefully. His book remains a striking insider's narrative of the American steel industry in the last decades of the nineteenth century-as well as the most revealing account of the emotions of some of its major owners.

The introduction by John Ingram places the book in perspective for both the historian and general reader.
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Richard Wright
An Introduction to the Man and His Works
Russell Carl Brignano
University of Pittsburgh Press

The first book-length study of Richard Wright (1908–1960) gives a critical, historical, and biographical perspective on the gifted African American writer. It presents Wright not only as an artist whose subjects and themes were affected by his race, but also as a sensitive and talented man who was deeply immersed in the major social and intellectual movements of his day.

Brigano discusses Wright’s artistry and his major public concerns as revealed in his novels, short stories, essays, and poetry: race relations in the United States, the role of Marxism in recent history and the future, the direction of international affairs, and the modes of modern personal and social philosophies.

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The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 5
The Correspondence, January 1855-October 1856
William H. Brock
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
This volume contains 266 letters covering a period of twenty-two months, when Tyndall was in his midthirties and had been employed by the Royal Institution as professor of natural philosophy since September 1853. Many of the letters printed here concern the lectures he delivered at the RI and other institutions and his attempt to establish his reputation as a researcher. Although he published in several other areas ‒including the cleavage of rocks, colorblindness and glaciers ‒the main focus of his research was the newly discovered and problematic phenomenon of diamagnetism. Tyndall reported his experimental results and theoretical views on this subject in several lectures and papers that greatly enhanced his scientific standing, which was further extended by his contact with other scientists, not only in London but across the British Isles and in France and Germany. By the end of this period, Tyndall was a man of science with a European reputation that was recognized in November 1856 when the Royal Society elected him a member of its Council. 
 
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From the Steel City to the White City
Western Pennsylvania and the World's Columbian Exposition
Zachary L. Brodt
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
How Pittsburgh Positioned Itself as a Center of Culture and Innovation at the Turn of the Century 

In From the Steel City to the White City, Zachary Brodt explores Western Pennsylvania’s representation at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, the first major step in demonstrating that Pittsburgh was more than simply America’s crucible—it was also a region of developing culture and innovation. The 1893 Columbian Exposition presented a chance for the United States to prove to the world that it was an industrial giant ready to become a global superpower. At the same time, Pittsburgh, a commercial center that formerly served as a starting point for western expansion, found itself serving as a major transportation, and increasingly industrial, hub during this period of extensive growth. Natural resources like petroleum and coal allowed Western Pennsylvania to become one of the largest iron- and steel-producing regions in the world. The Chicago fairgrounds provided a lucrative opportunity for area companies not only to provide construction materials but to display the region’s many products. While Pittsburgh’s most famous contributions to the 1893 World’s Fair—alternating current electricity and the Ferris wheel—had a lasting impact on the United States and the world, other exhibits provided a snapshot of the area’s industries, natural resources, and inventions. The success of these exhibits, Brodt reveals, launched local companies into the twentieth century, ensuring a steady flow of work, money, and prestige
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London
Water and the Making of the Modern City
John Broich
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013

As people crowded into British cities in the nineteenth century, industrial and biological waste byproducts and then epidemic followed. Britons died by the thousands in recurring plagues. Figures like Edwin Chadwick and John Snow pleaded for measures that could save lives and preserve the social fabric.

The solution that prevailed was the novel idea that British towns must build public water supplies, replacing private companies. But the idea was not an obvious or inevitable one. Those who promoted new waterworks argued that they could use water to realize a new kind of British society—a productive social machine, a new moral community, and a modern civilization. They did not merely cite the dangers of epidemic or scarcity. Despite many debates and conflicts, this vision won out—in town after town, from Birmingham to Liverpool to Edinburgh, authorities gained new powers to execute municipal water systems.

But in London local government responded to environmental pressures with a plan intended to help remake the metropolis into a collectivist society. The Conservative national government, in turn, sought to impose a water administration over the region that would achieve its own competing political and social goals. The contestants over London’s water supply matched divergent strategies for administering London’s water with contending visions of modern society. And the matter was never pedestrian. The struggle over these visions was joined by some of the most colorful figures of the late Victorian period, including John Burns, Lord Salisbury, Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

As Broich demonstrates, the debate over how to supply London with water came to a head when the climate itself forced the endgame near the end of the nineteenth century. At that decisive moment, the Conservative party succeeded in dictating the relationship between water, power, and society in London for many decades to come.

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Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean
Alejandra Bronfman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012

Outside of music, the importance of sound and listening have been greatly overlooked in Latin American history. Visual media has dominated cultural studies, affording an incomplete record of the modern era. This edited volume presents an original analysis of the role of sound in Latin American and Caribbean societies, from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors examine the importance of sound in the purveyance of power, gender roles, race, community, religion, and populism. They also demonstrate how sound is essential to the formation of citizenship and nationalism.

Sonic media, and radio in particular, have become primary tools for contesting political issues. In that vein, the contributors view the control of radio transmission and those who manipulate its content for political gain. Conversely, they show how, in neoliberal climates, radio programs have exposed corruption and provided a voice for activism.

The essays address sonic production in a variety of media: radio; Internet; digital recordings; phonographs; speeches; carnival performances; fireworks festivals, and the reinterpretation of sound in literature. They examine the bodily experience of sound, and its importance to memory coding and identity formation.

This volume looks to sonic media as an essential vehicle for transmitting ideologies, imagined communities, and culture. As the contributors discern, modern technology has made sound ubiquitous, and its study is therefore crucial to understanding the flow of information and influence in Latin America and globally.

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City of Lake and Prairie
Chicago's Environmental History
Kathleen A. Brosnan
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Known as the Windy City and the Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago has earned a more apt sobriquet—City of Lake and Prairie—with this compelling, innovative, and deeply researched environmental history.  Sitting at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, one of the largest freshwater bodies in the world, and on the eastern edge of the tallgrass prairies that fill much of the North American interior, early residents in the land that Chicago now occupies enjoyed natural advantages, economic opportunities, and global connections over centuries, from the Native Americans who first inhabited the region to the urban dwellers who built a metropolis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As one millennium ended and a new one began, these same features sparked a distinctive Midwestern environmentalism aimed at preserving local ecosystems. Drawing on its contributors’ interdisciplinary talents, this volume reveals a rich but often troubled landscape shaped by communities of color, workers, and activists as well as complex human relations with industry, waterways, animals, and disease.
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Inka Bird Idiom
Amazonian Feathers in the Andes
Claudia Brosseder
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
How Indigenous People Used Feathers as a Significant Way of Symbolic Communication in the Andes  

From majestic Amazonian macaws and highland Andean hawks to tiny colorful tanagers and tall flamingos, birds and their feathers played an important role in the Inka empire. Claudia Brosseder uncovers the many meanings that Inkas attached to the diverse fowl of the Amazon, the eastern Andean foothills, and the highlands. She shows how birds and feathers shaped Inka politics, launched wars, and initiated peace. Feathers provided protection against unpredictable enemies, made possible communication with deities, and brought an imagined Inka past into a political present. Richly textured contexts of feathered objects recovered from Late Horizon archaeological records and from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts written by Spanish interlocutors enable new insights into Inka visions of interspecies relationships, an Inka ontology, and Inka views of the place of the human in their ecology. Inka Bird Idiom invites reconsideration of the deep intellectual ties that connected the Amazon and the mountain forests with the Andean highlands and the Pacific coast. 
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The Weak and the Powerful
Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned Movement in the World
Jonathan C. Brown
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
Panama is a country whose geopolitical importance outweighs its size because of the volume of trade that passes the Central American isthmus through the canal. For nearly a century, the United States occupied and controlled the Panama Canal Zone and its shipping operations. In 1999, control was passed to Panama’s Canal Authority. This peaceful transfer was a result of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties. The Weak and the Powerful studies how a weak country negotiated the Cold War and how a strongman navigated between competing power blocs. Omar Torrijos took power in Panama through a 1968 coup d’état and ruled that country until his death in 1981. He committed his country to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which purported to stand for noninterference and against imperialism. Jonathan C. Brown looks at how Torrijos and the NAM were able to mobilize world opinion of the weak against the powerful to pressure the United States to live up to its democratic and international ideals regarding sovereignty of the canal. The author also demonstrates how world opinion was unable to address the problems of ideologically motivated warfare in neighboring Central American states. 
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Science and Moral Imagination
A New Ideal for Values in Science
Matthew J. Brown
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed “the ideal of moral imagination,” emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science.
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Re-Collecting Black Hawk
Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest
Nicholas A. Brown
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Makataimeshekiakiak, the Sauk Indian war leader whose name loosely translates to “Black Hawk,” surrendered in 1832 after hundreds of his fellow tribal members were slaughtered at the Bad Axe Massacre.
Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. Contributors include  tribal officials, scholars, activists, and others including George Thurman, the principal chief of the Sac and Fox Nation and a direct descendant of Black Hawk. These image-text encounters offer visions of both the past and present and the shaping of memory through landscapes that reach beyond their material presence into spaces of cultural and political power. As we witness, the evocation of Black Hawk serves as a painful reminder, a forced deference, and a veiled attempt to wipe away the guilt of past atrocities. Re-Collecting Black Hawk also points toward the future. By simultaneously unsettling and reconstructing the midwestern landscape, it envisions new modes of peaceful and just coexistence and suggests alternative ways of inhabiting the landscape.

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Domestic Interior
Stephanie Brown
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008
The poems in Domestic Interior describe the private and sometimes secret spaces of marriage, parenthood, and knowledge.
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Tropic Tendencies
Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean
Kevin Adonis Browne
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013
A  legacy of slavery, abolition, colonialism, and class struggle has profoundly impacted the people and culture of the Caribbean. In Tropic Tendencies, Kevin Adonis Browne examines the development of an Anglophone Caribbean rhetorical tradition in response to the struggle to make meaning, maintain identity, negotiate across differences, and thrive in light of historical constraints and the need to participate in contemporary global culture.

Browne bases his study on the concept of the “Caribbean carnivalesque” as the formative ethos driving cultural and rhetorical production in the region and beyond it. He finds that carnivalesque discourse operates as a “continuum of discursive substantiation” that increases the probability of achieving desired outcomes for both the rhetor and the audience. Browne also views the symbolic and material interplay of the masque and its widespread use to amplify efforts of resistance, assertion, and liberation.

Browne analyzes rhetorical modes and strategies in a variety of forms, including music, dance, folklore, performance, sermons, fiction, poetry, photography, and digital media. He introduces chantwells, calypsonians, old talkers, jamettes, stickfighters, badjohns, and others as exemplary purveyors of Caribbean rhetoric and deconstructs their rhetorical displays. From novels by Earl Lovelace, he also extracts thematic references to kalinda, limbo, and dragon dances that demonstrate the author’s claim of an active vernacular sensibility. He then investigates the re-creation and reinvention of the carnivalesque in cyber culture, demonstrating the ways participants both flaunt and defy normative ideas of “Caribbeanness” in online and macro environments.
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Gone to Ground
A History of Environment and Infrastructure in Dar es Salaam
Emily Brownell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Finalist, 2021 ASA Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize

Gone to Ground is an investigation into the material and political forces that transformed the cityscape of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is both the story of a particular city and the history of a global moment of massive urban transformation from the perspective of those at the center of this shift. Built around an archive of newspapers, oral history interviews, planning documents, and a broad compendium of development reports, Emily Brownell writes about how urbanites navigated the state’s anti-urban planning policies along with the city’s fracturing infrastructures and profound shortages of staple goods to shape Dar’s environment. They did so most frequently by “going to ground” in the urban periphery, orienting their lives to the city’s outskirts where they could plant small farms, find building materials, produce charcoal, and escape the state’s policing of urban space.
 
Taking seriously as historical subject the daily hurdles of families to find housing, food, transportation, and space in the city, these quotidian concerns are drawn into conversation with broader national and transnational anxieties about the oil crisis, resource shortages, infrastructure, and African socialism. In bringing these concerns together into the same frame, Gone to Ground considers how the material and political anxieties of the era were made manifest in debates about building materials, imported technologies, urban agriculture, energy use, and who defines living and laboring in the city.
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The Composition of Tender is the Night
Matthew J. Bruccoli
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963

Working with the complete collection of Tender is the Night manuscripts in the Princeton University Library, Matthew J. Bruccoli reconstructs seventeen drafts and three versions of the novel to answer questions about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s major work that have long puzzled critics of modern literature.


In 1934, nine years after the appearance of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald permitted publication of Tender is the Night. Disappointed by its critical reception, Fitzgerald suggested that the structure of the novel should be drastically rearranged. In 1951, eleven years after his death, Charles Scribner’s Sons brought out an edition that incorporated Fitzgerald’s changes. Controversy arose over the merits of the two published versions and over the “nine lost years” in Fitzgerald’s life between his two great novels, years of rewriting before publication of Tender is the Night that resulted in six cartons of notes and drafts. After analyzing this wealth of material, Bruccoli reconstructs every working stage in the novel and reaches his own conclusions about which edition is the most valid.

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The O’Hara Concern
A Biography of John O’Hara
Matthew J. Bruccoli
University of Pittsburgh Press
The definitive biography of short story writer John O’Hara.
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Understanding Attitudes About War
Gregory G. Brunk
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996

Choice 1997 Outstanding Academic Book


Why have some traditional cold warriors opposed involvement in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, while many vocal critics of the Vietnam war supported the use of U.S. forces in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans? What do these debates tell us about American attitudes toward the use of military force to achieve foreign policy goals? The authors examine the ethical and moral underpinnings of U.S. international relations by exploring the attitudes of decision makers and foreign policy elites toward war. Their unique contribution is to bring together the various doctrines in the literature and to characterize them using behavioral methodologies, in an attempt to bring normative questions back into the mainstream of political science.

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Cuban Sugar Policy from 1963 to 1970
Translated by Marguerite Borchardt and H. F. Broch de Rothermann
Heinrich Brunner
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977
In 1963 Cuba launched a program to develop its economy by expanding its sugar production and export trade. Cuban economists believed that through intensive development of this leading sector, they could generate capital to invest in manufacturing and thus move away from a one-crop economy.

After providing background information on Cuba's prerevolutionary economy, Brunner explores the effects of Communist ideology and the U.S. embargo on the country's resources and trade, and analyzes the problems Cuba faced in shifting from trade with the U.S. to trade with the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc.  He evaluates their implementation of the development plan, assessing the sugar industry within Cuba as well as how its accelerated development affected the rest of the domestic economy.
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Making Citizens in Argentina
Benjamin Bryce
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
Making Citizens in Argentina charts the evolving meanings of citizenship in Argentina from the 1880s to the 1980s. Against the backdrop of immigration, science, race, sport, populist rule, and dictatorship, the contributors analyze the power of the Argentine state and other social actors to set the boundaries of citizenship. They also address how Argentines contested the meanings of citizenship over time, and demonstrate how citizenship came to represent a great deal more than nationality or voting rights. In Argentina, it defined a person’s relationships with, and expectations of, the state. Citizenship conditioned the rights and duties of Argentines and foreign nationals living in the country. Through the language of citizenship, Argentines explained to one another who belonged and who did not. In the cultural, moral, and social requirements of citizenship, groups with power often marginalized populations whose societal status was more tenuous. Making Citizens in Argentina also demonstrates how workers, politicians, elites, indigenous peoples, and others staked their own claims to citizenship.
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Race and Transnationalism in the Americas
Benjamin Bryce
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
National borders and transnational forces have been central in defining the meaning of race in the Americas. Race and Transnationalism in the Americas examines the ways that race and its categorization have functioned as organizing frameworks for cultural, political, and social inclusion—and exclusion—in the Americas. Because racial categories are invariably generated through reference to the “other,” the national community has been a point of departure for understanding race as a concept. Yet this book argues that transnational forces have fundamentally shaped visions of racial difference and ideas of race and national belonging throughout the Americas, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Examining immigration exclusion, indigenous efforts toward decolonization, government efforts to colonize, sport, drugs, music, populism, and film, the authors examine the power and limits of the transnational flow of ideas, people, and capital. Spanning North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, the volume seeks to engage in broad debates about race, citizenship, and national belonging in the Americas.
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State, Labor, Capital
Democratizing Class Relations in the Southern Cone
Paul G. Buchanan
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995
Organized labor has played a critical role in political transition away from authoritarianism in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Buchanan views the institutional networks where these new governments strive to maintain democracy, focusing on the role of national labor administrations.

This book argues that because democratic capitalist regimes are founded on a state-mediated class compromise, institutionalizing labor relations is a major concern. Institutions that foster equitable labor-management bargaining are at the foundation of workers' acquiescence to bourgeois rule.
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front cover of Human and Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy and Medicine
Human and Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy and Medicine
Stefanie Buchenau
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, new anatomical investigations of the brain and the nervous system, together with a renewed interest in comparative anatomy, allowed doctors and philosophers to ground their theories on sense perception, the emergence of human intelligence, and the soul/body relationship in modern science. They investigated the anatomical structures and the physiological processes underlying the rise, differentiation, and articulation of human cognitive activities, and looked for the “anatomical roots” of the specificity of human intelligence when compared to other forms of animal sensibility.

This edited volume focuses on medical and philosophical debates on human intelligence and animal perception in the early modern age, providing fresh insights into the influence of medical discourse on the rise of modern philosophical anthropology. Contributions from distinguished historians of philosophy and medicine focus on sixteenth-century zoological, psychological, and embryological discourses on man; the impact of mechanism and comparative anatomy on philosophical conceptions of body and soul; and the key status of sensibility in the medical and philosophical enlightenment.
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Game Theory in the Behavioral Sciences
Ira R. Buchler
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969

This collection of essays was the first major attempt to apply game theory, linear programming, and graph theory to anthropological data.

Contributors: John Atkins; Ira B. Buchler; Albert M. Chammah; Luke Curtis; Walter Goldschmidt; Hans Hoffman; Robert Kozelka; Bernhardt Lieberman; Frank B. Livingstone; R. Michael McKinlay; Anatol Rapoport; Richard F. Salisbury; T. C. Schelling; M. Shubik; and Martin Southwold.

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Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History
Susan Buck-Morss
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009
In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation.  Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. 

Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences.  What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a “new humanism,” one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity. 
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front cover of The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania
The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania
Solon J. Buck
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1939
A definitive account of nearly every aspect of Western Pennsylvanian life and development up until the War of 1812. The book opens with a narrative of the formative years of the region. Succeeding chapters deal with the development of agriculture, industry, education, religion, social customs, and law and order --all based upon the results of the work of the Western Pennsylvania Historical Survey.

Among the more than one hundred illustrations are contemporary pictures, maps, plans of forts, portraits, architectural photographs and more.
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Emily Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s
A Documentary History
Willis J. Buckingham
University of Pittsburgh Press

This work reprint, annotates, and indexes virtually all mention of Emily Dickinson in the first decade of her publication, tripling the known references to the poet during the nineties. Much of this material, drawn from scrapbooks of clippings, rare journals, and crumbling newspapers, was on the verge of extinction.


Modern audiences will be struck by the impact of Dickinson’s poetry on her first readers. We learn much about the taste of the period and the relationship between publishers, reviewers, and the reading public. It demonstrates that Dickinson enjoyed a wider popular reception than had been realized: readers were astonished by her creative brilliance.

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Star Journal
Selected Poems
Christopher Buckley
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Star Journal is a selection of poems from Christopher Buckley's twenty previous collections, from 1980-2014.

Past praise from Philip Levine:
“The poems are modest, straight forward, intensely lyrical and totally accessible. . . .  This is a humble poetry of great truths and profound emotions that never overstates its concerns for the events both in and above the world.  It rewards countless readings and never betrays itself.”
—Ploughshares
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front cover of Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania
Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania
Maria Bucur
University of Pittsburgh Press

Eugenics movements gained momentum throughout Eastern Europe between World Wars I and II. Maria Bucur demonstrates that the importance of the eugenics movement in Romania rests not so much in the contributions made to the study of science as in the realm of nationalist ideology and social policy making.

The notion that the quality and quantity of the human species could and should be controlled manifested itself through social engineering projects ranging from reshaping gender roles and isolating ethnic undesirables to introducing broad public health measures and educational reform. Romanian eugenicists sought to control such modernization processes as urbanization and industrialization without curbing them, yet they also embraced attitudes more typically identified with anti-modernists in Romanian politics and culture.

Bucur is the first historian to explore the role of eugenics as a response to the challenges of nation- and state-building in Eastern Europe. She presents a balanced assessment of the interwar eugenics movement’s success and failures and identifies connections and discontinuities between the movement and the post-war communist regime.

[more]

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A Gift of Belief
Philanthropy and the Forging of Pittsburgh
Kathleen W. Buechel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

Philanthropy has long been associated with images of industrial titans and wealthy families. In Pittsburgh, long a center for industry, the shadows of Carnegie, Mellon, Frick, and others loom especially large, while the stories of working-class citizens who uplifted their neighbors remain untold. For the first time, these two portraits of Pittsburgh philanthropy converge in a rich historic tapestry. The Gift of Belief reveals how Pittsburghers from every strata, creed, and circumstance organized their private resources for the public good. The industrialists and their foundations are here but stand alongside lesser known philanthropists equally involved in institution building, civic reform, and community empowerment.

Beginning with sectarian philanthropy in the nineteenth century, moving to scientific philanthropy in the early twentieth century and Pittsburgh Renaissance-era institution-building, and concluding with modern entrepreneurship, twelve authors trace how Pittsburgh aligned with, led, or lagged behind the national philanthropic story and explore how ideals of charity and philanthropy entwined to produce distinctive forms of engagement that has defined Pittsburgh’s civic life.

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front cover of Enduring Controversies in Presidential Nominating Politics
Enduring Controversies in Presidential Nominating Politics
Emmett H. Buell Jr
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

Enduring Controversies in Presidential Nominating Politics retraces the more than two hundred-year history of presidential elections in the United States to provide a primer on how the process has evolved from the days of the founders, through the heyday of nominating conventions, to today’s overwhelming interest in early primaries.

Original essays by the editors introduce, critique, and occasionally even refute a wide variety of historical readings including Alexander Hamilton’s defense of election procedures, excerpts of individual states’ nominations of candidates in 1824, an overview of the impact television has had on nominating conventions, and calls for a national rotating primary scheme in 2004. As a whole, the collection reveals the common threads that run through the history of the nominating process, and points out that today’s litany of complaints is not at all new.

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Imagination Beyond Nation
Latin American Popular Culture
Eva Bueno
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999
Can scholarly pursuit of soap operas and folk art actually reveal a national imagination? This innovative collection features studies of iconography in Mexico, telenovelas in Venezuela, drama in Chile, cinema in Brazil, comic strips and tango in Argentina, and ceramics in Peru. In examining these popular arts, the scholars gathered here ask the same broad questions: what precisely is a national culture at the level of the popular? The national idea in Latin America emerges from these pages as a problematic, divided one, worth sustained attention in the field of culture studies. Many different arts come forth in all their richness and vitality, compelling us to look, listen, and understand.
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Polish Americans and Their History
Community, Culture, and Politics
John J Bukowczyk
University of Pittsburgh Press
"These richly detailed, readable essays come at a propitious time. For despite all the talk in the academy of 'multiculturalism,' the Poles presence on the American scene is still too often neglected." --Anthony Bukoski, University of Wisconsin, Superior This rich collection brings together the work of eight leading scholars to examine the history of Polish-American workers, women, families, and politics. Contributors: Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Andrzej Brozek, William G. Falkowski, William J. Galush, Thaddeus C. Radzilowski, Daniel Stone, and Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann John J. Bukowczyk is professor of history at Wayne State University and author of And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish Americans.
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Permeable Border
The Great Lakes Basin As Transnational Region 1650-1990
John J Bukowczyk
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

From the colonial era of waterborne transport, through nineteenth-century changes in transportation and communication, to globalization, the history of the Great Lakes Basin has been shaped by the people, goods, and capital crossing and recrossing the U.S.-Canadian border.

During the past three centuries, the region has been buffeted by efforts to benefit from or defeat economic and political integration and by the politics of imposing, tightening, or relaxing the bisecting international border. Where tariff policy was used in the early national period to open the border for agricultural goods, growing protectionism in both countries transformed the border into a bulwark against foreign competition after the 1860s. In the twentieth century, labor migration followed by multinational corporations fundamentally altered the customary pairing of capital and nation to that of capital versus nation, challenging the concept of international borders as key factors in national development.

In tracing the economic development of the Great Lakes Basin as borderland and as transnational region, the authors of Permeable Border have provided a regional history that transcends national borders and makes vital connections between two national histories that are too often studied as wholly separate.

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Peasant Dreams and Market Politics
Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905
Jeffrey Burds
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998
Examines how peasant migration—the movement of males to cities for wage labor—affected villages before the Bolshevik revolution. New Russian sources are utilized.
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front cover of Parties And Unions In The New Global Economy
Parties And Unions In The New Global Economy
Katrina Burgess
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

For much of the twentieth century, unions played a vital role in shaping political regimes and economic development strategies, particularly in Latin America and Europe. However, their influence has waned as political parties with close ties to unions have adopted neoliberal reforms harmful to the interests of workers.

What do unions do when confronted with this “loyalty dilemma”? Katrina Burgess compares events in three countries to determine the reasons for widely divergent responses on the part of labor leaders to remarkably similar challenges. She argues that the key to understanding why some labor leaders protest and some acquiesce lies essentially in two domains: the relative power of the party and the workers to punish them, and the party's capacity to act autonomously from its own government.

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The Homestead Strike of 1892
Arthur Burgoyne
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979
In 1893 Arthur Burgoyne, one of Pittsburgh’s most skilled and sensitive journalists, published Homestead, a complete history of the 1892 Homestead strike and the ensuing conflict between the Carnegie Steel Company and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.  Accurate, readable, and judiciously balanced in assigning blame, this work gives crucial insight into a turbulent period in Pittsburgh’s history.
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Ruby for Grief
Michael Burkard
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981
The work of Michael Burkard has a rich interior quality different from that of any other voice in American poetry. He captures a sense of the mind revising and revealing itself, altering its perceptions.
 
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Rhetorical Crossover
The Black Presence in White Culture
Cedric D. Burrows
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Winner, 2021 NCTE David H. Russell Award

In music, crossover means that a song has moved beyond its original genre and audience into the general social consciousness. Rhetorical Crossover uses the same concept to theorize how the black rhetorical presence has moved in mainstream spaces in an era where African Americans were becoming more visible in white culture. Cedric Burrows argues that when black rhetoric moves into the dominant culture, white audiences appear welcoming to African Americans as long as they present an acceptable form of blackness for white tastes. The predominant culture has always constructed coded narratives on how the black rhetorical presence should appear and behave when in majority spaces. In response, African Americans developed their own narratives that revise and reinvent mainstream narratives while also reaffirming their humanity. Using an interdisciplinary model built from music, education, film, and social movement studies, Rhetorical Crossover details the dueling narratives about African Americans that percolate throughout the United States. 
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The Improbable Swervings of Atoms
Christopher Bursk
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Winner of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

The Improbable Swervings of Atoms follows the comedic, often painful, physical and emotional travails of a young boy growing up in 1950s America.  He watches the McCarthy hearings, conquers the Congo, assassinates the president, has his head stuffed into a toilet, drops his uniform on the fifty-yard line, and tries to make sense of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura.

The poems engage history in a very intimate way, revealing how a boy, as he matures, attempts to understand the world around him, his own physical development, the people in his life, and what it means to live in a country and time where it is impossible to disengage oneself from world events—where, in fact, the quest for identity is an act that requires one to rewrite history in personal terms.

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Politics In The Andes
Identity, Conflict, Reform
Jo-Marie Burt
University of Pittsburgh Press

The Andean region is perhaps the most violent and politically unstable in the Western Hemisphere. Politics in the Andes is the first comprehensive volume to assess the persistent political challenges facing Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela.

Arguing that Andean states and societies have been shaped by common historical forces, the contributors' comparative approach reveals how different countries have responded variously to the challenges and opportunities presented by those forces. Individual chapters are structured around themes of ethnic, regional, and gender diversity; violence and drug trafficking; and political change and democracy.

Politics in the Andes offers a contemporary view of a region in crisis, providing the necessary context to link the often sensational news from the area to broader historical, political, economic, and social trends.

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The Social Documentary in Latin America
Julianne Burton
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990
Twenty essays by major filmmakers and critics provide the first survey of the evolution of documentary film in Latin America. While acknowledging the political and historical weight of the documentary, the contributors are also concerned with the aesthetic dimensions of the medium and how Latin American practitioners have defined the boundaries of the form.
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Horses In Midstream
U.S. Midterm Elections and Their Consequences, 1894–1998
Andrew E Busch
University of Pittsburgh Press

Horses in Midstream breaks the mold of midterm election literature by focusing on the consequences of midterm elections rather than on the causes of the anti-administration pattern of those elections. The book concludes that the midterm pattern has two primary consequences: it stymies the President and provides an opportunity for the revitalization of the opposition party—and that numerical losses by the President's party is really only a small part of the equation. Consequently, midterm elections can be considered an additional check in the U.S. political system, acting as a mechanism that helps to assure rough two party balance.

In examining the historical results from midterm elections dating back to 1894 and extending to the surprising result of 1994 and 1998, Busch has uncovered seven consistent ways in which the president and his party are harmed by midterm elections. These elections unfavorably alter the composition of congress, both between the parties and within the President's own party; they deprive the President of the plebiscitary power derived from his original electoral mandate; they give an intangible sense of momentum to the opposition party, leading to renewed opportunities for the opposition to put forward new leaders and to develop winning issues; they exacerbate splits within the President's own party; and they provide the opposition party with expanded party-building opportunities at the state level. Busch also places the midterm elections into four categories: "preparatory" midterms, which contribute to a subsequent change in party control of the Presidency; "calibrating" midterms in which voters slow but do not reverse extraordinary periods of Presidentially-driven change; "normal" midterms when midterm elections stymie the President without contributing to a White House takeover; and the rare "creative exceptions" when an administration escapes the midterm curse at the polls and find themselves invigorated rather than weakened. Busch's new approach to midterm elections, his well supported conclusions, and his clear, consistent style will certainly be of interest to political scientists and will translate well to the classroom.
 

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Outsiders and Openness in the Presidential Nominating System
Andrew E. Busch
University of Pittsburgh Press
Outsiders and Openness in the Presidential Nominating System examines the relationship of outsiders to the presidential nominating system since the late nineteenth century. He studies in depth the campaigns of Estes Kefauver, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, and Ross Perot.
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Other Americans
The Art of Latin America in the US Imaginary
Matthew Bush
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Grounded in perspectives of affect theory, Other Americans examines the writings of Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Alarcón; films by Alfonso Cuarón, Claudia Llosa, Matt Piedmont, and Joel and Ethan Coen; as well as the Netflix serials Narcos and El marginal. These widely consumed works about Latin America—equally balanced between narratives produced in the United States and in the region itself—are laden with fear, anxiety, and shame, which has an impact that exceeds the experience of reception. The negative feelings encoded in visions of Latin America become common coinage for US audiences, shaping their ideological relationship with the region and performing an affective interpellation. By analyzing the underlying melodramatic structures of these works that would portray Latin America as an implicit other, Bush examines a process of affective comprehension that foments an us/them, or north/south binary in the reception of Latin America’s globalized art.

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Women and the Trades
Pittsburgh, 1907–1908
Elizabeth Beardsley Butler
University of Pittsburgh Press
Women and the Trades has long been regarded as a masterwork in the field of social investigation. Originally published in 1909, it was one of six volumes of the path breaking Pittsburgh Survey, the first attempt in the United States to study, systematically and comprehensively, life and labor in one industrial city. No other book documents so precisely the many technological and organizational changes that transformed women's wage work in the early 1900s.

Despite Pittsburgh's image as a male-oriented steel town, many women also worked for a living-rolling cigars, canning pickles, or clerking in stores. The combination of manufacturing, distribution, and communication services made the city of national economic developments.

What Butler found in her visits to countless workplaces did not flatter the city, its employers, or its wage earners. With few exceptions, labor unions served the interests of skilled males. Women's jobs were rigidly segregated, low paying, usually seasonal, and always insecure. Ethnic distinctions erected powerful barriers between different groups of women, as did status hierarchies based on job function.

Professor Maurine Weiner Greenwald's introduction provides biographical sketches of Butler and photographer Lewis Hine and examines the validity of Butler's assumptions and findings, especially with regard to protective legislation, women worker's “passivity,” and working-class family strategies.
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William Whewell's Theory of Scientific Method
Robert E. Butts
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969
William Whewell is considered one of the most important nineteenth-century British philosophers of science and a contributor to modern philosophical thought, particularly regarding the problem of induction and the logic of discovery.  In this volume, Robert E. Butts offers selections from Whewell's most important writings, and analysis of counter-claims to his philosophy.
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Solomon Maimon
Monism, Skepticism, and Mathematics
Meir Buzaglo
University of Pittsburgh Press
The philosophy of Solomon Maimon (1753–1800) is usually considered an important link between Kant’s transcendental philosophy and German idealism. Highly praised during his lifetime, over the past two centuries Maimon’s genius has been poorly understood and often ignored. Meir Buzaglo offers a reconstruction of Maimon’s philosophy, revealing that its true nature becomes apparent only when viewed in light of his philosophy of mathematics.

This provides the key to understanding Maimon’s solution to Kant’s quid juris question concerning the connection between intuition and concept in mathematics. Maimon’s original approach avoids dispensing with intuition (as in some versions of logicism and formalism) while reducing the reliance on intuition in its Kantian sense. As Buzaglo demonstrates, this led Maimon to question Kant’s ultimate rejection of the possibility of metaphysics and, simultaneously, to suggest a unique type of skepticism.
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Margaret Byington
University of Pittsburgh Press
Homestead, first published in 1910 as one volume in the classic Pittsburgh Survey, describes daily life in a community that was dominated economically and physically by the giant Homestead Works of the United States Steel Corporation.  Homestead, just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, developed as a completely separate city -- a true mill town settled by newer immigrants and shaped in its attitudes by the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892.
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Homestead
The Households of a Mill Town (2nd Edition)
Margaret Byington
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

First published in 1910 in the classic Pittsburgh Survey, this pioneering work of American social history, reproduced in its entirety, describes daily life in a community that was dominated economically and physically by the giant Homestead Works of the United States Steel Corporation. The town of Homestead, just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, developed as a completely separate city—a true mill town settled by newer immigrants and shaped in its attitudes by the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892, which significantly set back unionization efforts in the steel industry. Homestead:The Households of a Mill Town not only focuses on the plight of the American steel worker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it also explores the domestic and community aspects of life in that time period.

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