Connors provides a history of composition and its pedagogical approaches to form, genre, and correctness. He shows where many of the today’s practices and assumptions about writing come from, and he translates what our techniques and theories of teaching have said over time about our attitudes toward students, language and life.

Connors locates the beginning of a new rhetorical tradition in the mid-nineteenth century, and from there, he discusses the theoretical and pedagogical innovations of the last two centuries as the result of historical forces, social needs, and cultural shifts.

This important book proves that American composition-rhetoric is a genuine, rhetorical tradition with its own evolving theria and praxis. As such it is an essential reference for all teachers of English and students of American education.

In Knowing and Seeing, Douglas Cooper reflects on his long career as a muralist in various cities around the world, including in Pittsburgh. The essays are also personal discussing family, memories from his childhood, mentoring from his Carnegie Mellon University professors, and his collaborations. They are also instructive. Murals are not walls but provide the appearance as such and require the artist to have a different skill set that is part architect, part painter, and part builder.

Writing begins with unconscious feelings of something that insistently demands to be responded to, acted upon, or elaborated into a new entity. Writers make things that matter—treaties, new species, software, and letters to the editor—as they interact with other humans of all kinds. As they write, they also continually remake themselves. In The Animal Who Writes, Cooper considers writing as a social practice and as an embodied behavior that is particularly important to human animals. The author argues that writing is an act of composing enmeshed in nature-cultures and is homologous with technology as a mode of making. 
 

The stories in this extraordinary collection are set in Northern Ireland, specifically Belfast, the center for more than thirty years of fighting between Roman Catholic nationalists and Protestants loyal to the British crown.  Cornell is not preoccupied, however, with the details of the war.  Her stories explore the emotional and psychological consequences of the struggle to endure not only violence, but loss, failure, and the inability to believe.

In The Andes Imagined, Jorge Coronado not only examines but also recasts the indigenismo movement of the early 1900s.  Coronado departs from the common critical conception of indigenismo as rooted in novels and short stories, and instead analyzes an expansive range of work in poetry, essays, letters, newspaper writing, and photography.  He uses this evidence to show how the movement's artists and intellectuals mobilize the figure of the Indian to address larger questions about becoming modern, and he focuses on the contradictions at the heart of indigenismo as a cultural, social, and political movement. 

By breaking down these different perspectives, Coronado reveals an underlying current in which intellectuals and artists frequently deployed their indigenous subject in order to imagine new forms of political inclusion.  He suggests that these deployments rendered particular variants of modernity and make indigenismo representational practices a privileged site for the examination of the region's cultural negotiation of modernization.  His analysis reveals a paradox whereby the un-modern indio becomes the symbol for the modern itself.

The Andes Imagined offers an original and broadly based engagement with indigenismo and its intellectual contributions, both in relation to early twentieth-century Andean thought and to larger questions of theorizing modernity.

Portraits in the Andes examines indigenous and mestizo self-representation through the medium of photography from the early to mid twentieth century. As Jorge Coronado reveals, these images offer a powerful counterpoint to the often-slanted, predominant view of indigenismo produced by the intellectual elite.
            Photography offered an inexpensive and readily available technology for producing portraits and other images that allowed lower- and middle-class racialized subjects to create their own distinct rhetoric and vision of their culture. The powerful identity-marking vehicle that photography provided to the masses has been overlooked in much of Latin American cultural studies—which have focused primarily on the elite’s visual arts. Coronado's study offers close readings of Andean photographic archives from the early- to mid-twentieth century, to show the development of a consumer culture and the agency of marginalized groups in creating a visual document of their personal interpretations of modernity.

The city of Buenos Aires has guaranteed all couples, regardless of gender, the right to register civil unions. Mexico City has approved the Cohabitation Law, which grants same-sex couples marital rights identical to those of common-law relationships between men and women. Yet, a gay man was murdered every two days in Latin America in 2005, and Brazil recently led the world in homophobic murders. These facts illustrate the wide disparity in the treatment and rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations across the region.

The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America presents the first English-language reader on LGBT politics in Latin America. Representing a range of contemporary works by scholars, activists, analysts, and politicians, the chapters address LGBT issues in nations from Cuba to Argentina. In their many findings, two main themes emerge: the struggle for LGBT rights has made significant inroads in the first decade of the twenty-first century (though not in every domain or every region); and the advances made were slow in coming compared to other social movements.

The articles uncover the many obstacles that LGBT activists face in establishing new laws and breaking down societal barriers. They identify perhaps the greatest roadblock in Latin American culture as an omnipresent system of “heteronormativity,” wherein heterosexuality, patriarchalism, gender hierarchies, and economic structures are deeply rooted in nearly every level of society. Along these lines, the texts explore specific impediments including family dependence, lack of public spaces, job opportunities, religious dictums, personal security, the complicated relationship between leftist political parties and LGBT movements in the region, and the ever-present “closets,” which keep LGBT issues out of the public eye.

The volume also looks to the future of LGBT activism in Latin America in areas such as globalization, changing demographics, the role of NGOs, and the rise of economic levels and education across societies, which may aid in a greater awareness of LGBT politics and issues. As the editors posit, to be democratic in the truest sense of the word, nations must recognize and address all segments of their populations.

The lives of animals in Russia are intrinsically linked to cultural, political and psychological transformations of the Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras. Other Animals examines the interaction of animals and humans in Russian literature, art, and life from the eighteenth century until the present. The chapters probe a range of human-animal relationships through tales of cruelty, interspecies communion and compassion, and efforts to either overcome or establish the human-animal divide. These essays also explore the unique nature of the Russian experience in this regard.  

Four themes run through the volume: the prevalence of animals in utopian visions; the ways in which Russians have both incorporated and sometimes challenged Western sensibilities and practices, such as the humane treatment of animals and the inclusion of animals in urban domestic life; the quest to identify and at times exploit the physiological basis of human and animal behavior and the ideological implications of these practices; and the breakdown of traditional human-animal hierarchies and categories during times of revolutionary upheaval, social transformation, or disintegration.

From failed Soviet attempts to transplant the semi-nomadic Sami and their reindeer herds onto collective farms, to performance artist Oleg Kulik’s scandalous portrayal of Pavlov’s dogs as a parody of the Soviet “new man,” to novelist Tatyana Tolstaya’s post-cataclysmic future world of hybrid animal species and their disaffection from the past, Other Animals presents a completely new perspective on Russian and Soviet history. It also offers a fascinating look into the Russian psyche as seen through human interactions with animals.

Cottam explains the patterns of U.S. intervention in Latin America by focusing on the cognitive images that have dominated policy makers' world views, influenced the procession of information, and informed strategies and tactics.  She employs a number of case studies of intervention and analyzes decision-making patterns from the early years of the cold war in Guatemala and Cuba to the post-cold-war policies in Panama and the war on drugs in Peru.  Using two particular images-the enemy and the dependent-Cottam explores why U.S. policy makers have been predisposed to intervene in Latin America when they have perceived an enemy (the Soviet Union) interacting with a dependent (a Latin American country), and why these images led to perceptions that continued to dominate policy into the post-cold-war era. 

With nuclear proliferation essentially eliminating full-scale warfare, governments have increasingly turned to what Richard W. Cottam calls competitive interference. This type of policy invokes counter-insurgency, political, economic, and psychological manipulations, and often involves looking deeply into the internal affairs of a country, often secretly. Cottam describes and defines competitive interference, explores the United States' institutional adjustment to it, and provides a theoretical framework for projection and evaluation of foreign policy in this changing diplomatic arena. He uses case studies of international relationships involving the United States, India, China, Vietnam, Iran, and the former USSR and East Germany to evaluate his theoretical stance, and proposes long-term institutionalization of policy, rather than covert operations.

Foreign policy motivation is a complex mix reflecting the fears and aspirations of publics, interest groups, bureaucratic sets, and important individuals. International conflict cannot be resolved without resolving how foreign policy is motivated. This book presents a conceptual framework for identifying and weighing foreign policy motives that shape, direct, and alter foreign policy.

Richard Cottam served in the U.S. embassy in Tehran from 1956 to 1958 and was consulted by the Department of State during the 1979 hostage crisis. This book draws upon his expert personal knowledge of Iranian politics to describe the spiraling decline of U.S.-Iranian relations since the cold war and the political consequences of those years U.S. policy, he argues, is flawed by ignorance, inertia, the tenacity of a cold war mentality, a quixotic tilt toward Iraq, and the blatant inconsistency of the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages scheme that produced the Iran-contra scandal.

For a brief period in the early 1950s, Iranian nationalism captured the world's attention as, under the leadership of Mohammad Mossadeq, the Iranian National Movement tried to liberate Iran from British imperialism. Regarding nationalism as a major determinant of the attitudes and loyalties of those who embrace it, Cottam analyzes the complex religious, national, and social values at work within Iran and examines, more generally, the turbulence of nationalism in developing states and its perplexing problems for American foreign policy.

In a new 40-page chapter, added in 1978, Cottam updated his pioneering study by examining the condition of Iran fifteen years after his first analysis-from its rapid economic growth as an oil producer to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's unsuccessful efforts to rouse nationalistic sentiment in his favor.

Contradicting the conventional political wisdom of the 1970s, which said state political parties were dormant and verging upon extinction, this book reveals that state party organizations actually grew stronger in the 1960s and 1970s.

Reprinted with a new preface that covers changes in the 1980s in electoral politics, Party Organizations in American Politics encourages a reappraisal of scholarly treatment of party organization in political science.
 

Death haunts the pages of Natural Causes, but so does compassion and love. There is little darkness here, and less despair, despite the abundance of cemeteries, loss, and ghosts—both real and imagined.

Mark Cox’s youthful bravado has given way in these poems to an assured sense of understatement. The weight of fatherhood, the loss of a grandmother, the fear of loneliness—these are the details around which Cox plumbs the depths of mortality and memory.

Fully comfortable with the domestic tableau from which he writes, this is a poet never complacent. The penchants for metaphor and the resonant turn of phrase that informed Cox’s earlier work remain as vibrant as ever, indeed are heightened, as he masterfully affirms and celebrates the range of familial complexity and human connectedness.

The development of the Dutch welfare state in the Netherlands started later than in other Western European countries, but once it started, it grew at a spectacular rate. The development was so rapid that it catapulted the Dutch from being welfare laggards to being welfare leaders. Cox charts the course of this growth, from the nineteenth century to the present, placing the Dutch case within the larger theoretical discussion of welfare states.

In so doing, Cox challenges the widely held assumption that welfare programs always represent the policies of the social democratic left. He demonstrates that it was not the left but the more centrist religious parties that built the Dutch welfare state in the 1960s. Even more curious is the fact that these same political forces had resisted the expansion of welfare programs throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

In many ways, the Netherlands is a crucial test case for assumptions about the welfare state. Its system is one of the largest in the world, rivaling Sweden's as one that devotes the greatest share of public spending to social welfare. How does it compare to other countries? Do present theories of welfare state development fit the Dutch case? What can we learn from the experience of a small state?

Cox makes a signal contribution in clarifying the historical record concerning a little-studied country and in advancing theoretical debate.
 

The landslide election of Evo Morales in December 2005 pointed toward a process of accelerated change in Bolivia, forging a path away from globalization and the neoliberal paradigm in favor of greater national control and state intervention.  This in turn shifted the power relations of Bolivia's internal politics-beginning with greater inclusion of the indigenous population-and altered the nation's foreign relations. Unresolved Tensions engages this realignment from a variety of analytical perspectives, using the Morales election as a lens through which to reassess Bolivia's contemporary political reality and its relation to a set of deeper historical issues.

This volume brings together an expert group of commentators and participants from within the Bolivian political arena to offer diverse perspectives and competing views on issues of ethnicity, regionalism, state-society relations, constitutional reform, economic development, and globalization.  In this way, the contributors seek to reassess Bolivia's past, present, and future, consider the ways in which the nation's historical developments flow from these deeper currents, and assess the opportunities and challenges that arise within the new political context.

In the eighteenth century, malaria was a prevalent and deadly disease, and the only effective treatment was found in the Andean forests of Spanish America: a medicinal bark harvested from cinchona trees that would later give rise to the antimalarial drug quinine. In 1751, the Spanish Crown asserted control over the production and distribution of this medicament by establishing a royal reserve of “fever trees” in Quito. Through this pilot project, the Crown pursued a new vision of imperialism informed by science and invigorated through commerce. But ultimately this project failed, much like the broader imperial reforms that it represented. Drawing on extensive archival research, Matthew Crawford explains why, showing how indigenous healers, laborers, merchants, colonial officials, and creole elites contested European science and thwarted imperial reform by asserting their authority to speak for the natural world. The Andean Wonder Drug uses the story of cinchona bark to demonstrate how the imperial politics of knowledge in the Spanish Atlantic ultimately undermined efforts to transform European science into a tool of empire.

 In the early modern Atlantic World, pharmacopoeias—official lists of medicaments and medicinal preparations published by municipal, national, or imperial governments—organized the world of healing goods, giving rise to new and valuable medical commodities such as cinchona bark, guaiacum, and ipecac. Pharmacopoeias and related texts, developed by governments and official medical bodies as a means to standardize therapeutic practice, were particularly important to scientific and colonial enterprises. They served, in part, as tools for making sense of encounters with a diversity of peoples, places, and things provoked by the commercial and colonial expansion of early modern Europe.

Drugs on the Page explores practices of recording, organizing, and transmitting information about medicinal substances by artisans, colonial officials, indigenous peoples, and others who, unlike European pharmacists and physicians, rarely had a recognized role in the production of official texts and medicines. Drawing on examples across various national and imperial contexts, contributors to this volume offer new and valuable insights into the entangled histories of knowledge resulting from interactions and negotiations between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans from 1500 to 1850.
 

Longlist, 2019 Julie Suk Prize for best poetry book published by a literary press

Some Glad Morning, Barbara Crooker’s ninth book of poetry, teeters between joy and despair, faith and doubt, the disconnect between lived experience and the written word. Primarily a lyric poet, Crooker is in love with the beauty and mystery of the natural world, even as she recognizes its fragility. But she is also a poet unafraid to write about the consequences of our politics, the great divide. She writes as well about art, with ekphrastic poems on paintings by Hopper, O’Keeffe, Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and others. Many of the poems are elegaic in tone, an older writer tallying up her losses. Her work embodies Bruce Springsteen’s dictum, “it ain’t no sin to be glad we’re alive,” as she celebrates the explosion of spring peonies, chocolate mousse, a good martini, hummingbirds’ flashy metallics, the pewter light of September, Darryl Dawkins (late NBA star), saltine crackers.  While she recognizes it might all be about to slip away, “Remember that nothing is ever lost,” she writes, and somehow, we do.

In urban America, large-scale redevelopment is a frequent news item.  Many proposals for such redevelopment are challenged—sometimes successfully, and other times to no avail.  The Politics of Place considers the reasons for these outcomes by examining five cases of contentious redevelopment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, between 1949 and 2000.

In four of these cases, the challengers to redevelopment failed to create the conditions necessary for strong democratic participation. In the fifth case—the proposed reconstruction of Pittsburgh’s downtown retail district (1997–2000)—challengers succeeded, and Crowley describes the crucial role of independent nonprofit organizations in bringing about this result.

At the heart of Crowley’s discussion are questions central to any urban redevelopment debate: Who participates in urban redevelopment, what motivates them to do so, and what structures in the political process open or close a democratic dialogue among the stakeholders? Through his astute analysis, Crowley answers these questions and posits a framework through which to view future contention in urban redevelopment.

Composition in the University examines the required introductory course in composition within American colleges and universities. Crowley argues that due to its association with literary studies in English departments, composition instruction has been inappropriately influenced by humanist pedagogy and that modern humanism is not a satisfactory rationale for the study of writing.  Crowley envisions possible nonhumanist rationales that could be developed for vertical curricula in writing instruction, were the universal requirement not in place.

Composition in the University examines the required introductory course in composition within American colleges and universities. According to Sharon Crowley, the required composition course has never been conceived in the way that other introductory courses have been—as an introduction to the principles and practices of a field of study. Rather it has been constructed throughout much of its history as a site from which larger educational and ideological agendas could be advanced, and such agendas have not always served the interests of students or teachers, even though they are usually touted as programs of study  that students “need.”
 
If there is a master narrative of the history of composition, it is told in the institutional attitude that has governed administration, design, and staffing of the course from its beginnings—the attitude that the universal requirement is in place in order to construct docile academic subjects.

Crowley argues that due to its association with literary studies in English departments, composition instruction has been inappropriately influenced by humanist pedagogy and that modern humanism is not a satisfactory rationale for the study of writing. She examines historical attempts to reconfigure the required course in nonhumanist terms, such as the advent of communications studies during the 1940s. Crowley devotes two essays to this phenomenon, concentrating on the furor caused by the adoption of a communications program at the University of Iowa. 
 
Composition in the University concludes with a pair of essays that argue against maintenance of the universal requirement. In the last of these, Crowley envisions possible nonhumanist rationales that could be developed for vertical curricula in writing instruction, were the universal requirement not in place.
 
Crowley presents her findings in a series of essays because she feels the history of the required composition course cannot easily be understood as a coherent narrative since understandings of the purpose of the required course have altered rapidly from decade to decade, sometimes in shockingly sudden and erratic fashion.
 
The essays in this book are informed by Crowley’s long career of teaching composition, administering a composition program, and training teachers of the required introductory course. The book also draw on experience she gained while working with committees formed by the Conference on College Composition and Communication toward implementation of the Wyoming Resolution, an attempt to better the working conditions of post-secondary teachers of writing.

Toward a Civil Discourse examines how, in the current political climate, Americans find it difficult to discuss civic issues frankly and openly with one another. Because America is dominated by two powerful discourses--liberalism and Christian fundamentalism, each of which paints a very different picture of America and its citizens' responsibilities toward their country-there is little common ground, and hence Americans avoid disagreement for fear of giving offence.

Sharon Crowley considers the ancient art of rhetoric as a solution to the problems of repetition and condemnation that pervade American public discourse. Crowley recalls the historic rhetorical concept of stasis--where advocates in a debate agree upon the point on which they disagree, thereby recognizing their opponent as a person with a viable position or belief. Most contemporary arguments do not reach stasis, and without it, Crowley states, a nonviolent resolution cannot occur.

Toward a Civil Discourse investigates the cultural factors that lead to the formation of beliefs, and how beliefs can develop into densely articulated systems and political activism. Crowley asserts that rhetorical invention (which includes appeals to values and the passions) is superior in some cases to liberal argument (which often limits its appeals to empirical fact and reasoning) in mediating disagreements where participants are primarily motivated by a moral or passionate commitment to beliefs.

Sharon Crowley examines numerous current issues and opposing views, and discusses the consequences to society when, more often than not, argumentative exchange does not occur. She underscores the urgency of developing a civil discourse, and through a review of historic rhetoric and its modern application, provides a foundation for such a discourse-whose ultimate goal, in the tradition of the ancients, is democratic discussion of civic issues.

This timely volume brings together specialists on the reform of social security systems to analyze the similarities and differences of those health care and pension reforms that have taken place since the early 1990s and suggests possible gains through recent or contemplated revisions to those systems.

Hubertis M. Cummings vividly relates the tale of the sturdy and indomitable Scotch-Irish settlers in Pennsylvania. Hardened from their ancient battles against tyranny and injustice in their native “bonnie Scotland,” they struggled to establish a new home in America along and beyond the Susquehanna River. Their passionate love of freedom and will to survive helped them make a life for themselves in a hostile frontier. Their deep faith and spirit would thrive in this region, as they helped to forge the identity and destiny a young nation.

Architecture and urbanism have contributed to one of the most sweeping transformations of our times. Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has been not only a dominant paradigm in politics but a process of bricks and mortar in everyday life. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this volume examines the multivalent role of architecture and urbanism in geographically variable yet interconnected processes of neoliberal transformation across scales—from China, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Britain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. Analyzing how buildings and urban projects in different regions since the 1960s have served in the implementation of concrete policies such as privatization, fiscal reform, deregulation, state restructuring, and the expansion of free trade, contributors reveal neoliberalism as a process marked by historical contingency. Neoliberalism on the Ground fundamentally reframes accepted narratives of both neoliberalism and postmodernism by demonstrating how architecture has articulated changing relationships between state, society, and economy since the 1960s.

In A House Divided, Richard Orr Curry investigates the political realities that led to the breakup of the Old Dominion and the emergence of a new state during the Civil War. Orr's analysis of the intra-state conflicts over political, economic, and social issues, party factions of Unionism and Secessionism and multiple layers of division within those factions, offer fascinating and original insights into the long debate that would lead to the ratification of the West Virginia state constitution in 1863.