The study of Latin America has long been an ideological battleground. Scholars disagree on every major issue: the impact of the U.S. influence in the region, the political orientation of the middle class, the role of the military, the rate of socioeconomic change, and the viability of reform.
Public Policy in Latin America is a masterful synthesis of scholarship on the region. Sloan studies political phenomena not by making superficial comparisons between leaders, parties or styles, but by examining what governments do-the creation of public policy through political process. The decisions to stress accumulation versus distribution of economic goods, the role of the bureaucracy, and the quality of political participation tell more about a nation than what party or persons are in power.
On June 4, 1923, the Bolivian military turned a machine gun on striking miners in the northern Potosí town of Uncía. The incident is remembered as Bolivia’s first massacre of industrial workers. The violence in Uncía highlights a formative period in the development of a working class who would eventually challenge the oligarchic control of the nation.
Robert L. Smale begins his study as Bolivia’s mining industry transitioned from silver to tin; specifically focusing on the region of Oruro and northern Potosí. The miners were part of a heterogeneous urban class alongside artisans, small merchants, and other laborers. Artisan mutual aid societies provided miners their first organizational models and the guidance to emancipate themselves from the mine owners’ political tutelage. During the 1910s both the Workers’ Labor Federation and the Socialist Party appeared in Oruro to spur more aggressive political action. In 1920 miners won a comprehensive contract that exceeded labor legislation debated in Congress in the years that followed. Relations between the working class and the government deteriorated soon after, leading to the 1923 massacre in Uncía. Smale ends his study with the onset of the Great Depression and premonitions of war with Paraguay—twin cataclysms that would discredit the old oligarchic order and open new horizons to the labor movement.
This period’s developments marked the entry of workers and other marginalized groups into Bolivian politics and the acquisition of new freedoms and basic rights. These events prefigure the rise of Evo Morales—a union activist born in Oruro—in the early twenty-first century.
Crime and violence soared in twenty-first-century Venezuela even as poverty and inequality decreased, contradicting the conventional wisdom that these are the underlying causes of violence. The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela explains the rise of violence under both Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro—leftist presidents who made considerable investment in social programs and political inclusion. Contributors argue that violence arose not from the frustration of inequality, or the needs created by poverty, but rather from the interrelated factors of a particular type of revolutionary governance, extraordinary oil revenues, a reliance on militarized policing, and the persistence of concentrated disadvantage. These factors led to dramatic but unequal economic growth, massive institutional and social change, and dysfunctional criminal justice policies that destabilized illicit markets and social networks, leading to an increase in violent conflict resolution. The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela reorients thinking about violence and its relationship to poverty, inequality, and the state.
Winner of the 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Blue on Blue Ground is about the body, desire, anxiety, and obsession—how what we want redeems and isolates us (and is sometimes used against us). These poems are artful yet accessible, lyrical yet direct, strange but recognizable.
Smith’s relentless self-examination, fear, sense of humor, and vulnerability are all laid to bare in crisp, precise language. From lonely observations, bizarre medical fascinations, emotion, loss, and honesty, Blue on Blue Ground constructs its internal and external worlds.
The metaphorical city is also a “body,” a place of exile and restoration, a symbol of hope, a catalyst for connection. The urban landscape is often the background for the moment or is the moment itself—the world looked at and sorted into words.
Though at times dark, there’s love to be found. Perhaps it’s what drives this collection, colors its observations, and leads it to finally announce: “Someone is putting the world back together.” <I>Blue on Blue Ground</I> wants to look at absolutely everything and believes that complete exploration of the physical and mental selves—fears and desires—is the key to moving and being completely alive in the material world.
Since its first publication in 1976, this guide - with nearly thirty thousand copies sold - has become the standard book for exploring the twenty-six counties of western Pennsylvania. Yet in the past fourteen years, many sites have been lost through fire, demolition, or neglect - and many other sites of historical interest have been discovered and documented. Now Helene Smith and George Swetnam have completely revised the text, updating the capsule histories, the site descriptions, and location directions (including all the new Pennsylvania road numbers), and adding several hundred new entries.
Calls for an Honest Reckoning of the Successes, Failures, and Unanticipated Results of International Developments
In general, “development” denotes movement or growth toward something better in the future. International development—widespread in the decades following World War II—was an effort at purposeful change in landscapes around the world. Contributors to this volume argue that these projects constituted an effort to transplant modernity, such as knowledge or technology, from places seen as more developed to places perceived as un- or underdeveloped. During its heyday, international development included not just dams, roads, health programs, and agricultural projects but also animal husbandry schemes, urban development, and wildlife protection plans. Projects often succeeded or failed because of existing environmental conditions, and in turn, these programs remade—or tried to remake—the land, water, wildlife, and people around them. From American-directed failures in water engineering in Afghanistan to the impact of livestock epidemics on economic growth in East Africa, the chapters in Transplanting Modernity question how science, technology, and faith in Western notions of progress have influenced the pace, scope, and scale of development.The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were the largest political party in Russia in the crucial revolutionary year of 1917. Heirs to the legacy of the People’s Will movement, the SRs were unabashed proponents of peasant rebellion and revolutionary terror, emphasizing the socialist transformation of the countryside and a democratic system of government as their political goals. They offered a compelling, but still socialist, alternative to the Bolsheviks, yet by the early 1920s their party was shattered and its members were branded as enemies of the revolution. In 1922, the SR leaders became the first fellow socialists to be condemned by the Bolsheviks as “counter-revolutionaries” in the prototypical Soviet show trial.
In Captives of the Revolution, Scott B. Smith presents both a convincing account of the defeat of the SRs and a deeper analysis of the significance of the political dynamics of the Civil War for subsequent Soviet history. Once the SRs decided to openly fight the Bolsheviks in 1918, they faced a series of nearly impossible political dilemmas. At the same time, the Bolsheviks fatally undermined the revolutionary credentials of the SRs by successfully appropriating the rhetoric of class struggle, painting a simplistic picture of Reds versus Whites in the Civil War, a rhetorical dominance that they converted into victory over the SRs and any left-wing alternative to Bolshevik dictatorship. In this narrative, the SRs became a bona fide threat to national security and enemies of the people—a characterization that proved so successful that it became an archetype to be used repeatedly by the Soviet leadership against any political opponents, even those from within the Bolshevik party itself.
In this groundbreaking study, Smith reveals a more complex and nuanced picture of the postrevolutionary struggle for power in Russia than we have ever seen before and demonstrates that the Civil War—and in particular the struggle with the SRs—was the formative experience of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state.
Green Republican chronicles the life of Congressman John Saylor and his personal legacy as an environmental champion. Saylor believed the wilderness was intrinsic to the American experience-that our concepts of democracy, love of country, conservation, and independence were shaped by our wilderness experiences. Through his ardent protection of national parks and diligent work to add new areas to the parks system, Saylor helped propel the American environmental movement in the three decades following Word War II.
At the height of the federal dam-building program in the 1950s and 1960s, Saylor blocked efforts to erect hydroelectric dams whose impounded waters would have invaded Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon. During the energy crisis of the early 1970s, Saylor denounced attempts to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. He was the House architect of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968. Because Saylor represented a coal-mining district, he doggedly promoted the use of coal, instead of atomic or hydropower, to generate electricity, and repeatedly won the support of his constituents over thirteen terms between 1949 and 1973. But he also fervently supported legislation to purify the air and water and redeem stripped lands.
Considered both a maverick and a pioneer, John Saylor won respect on both sides of the aisle because he was direct, hardworking, and passionate about conservation at a time when the cause was not popular. Environmental leaders dubbed him “St. John” because he tenaciously advocated their proposals and battled resistance by resource-use proponents.
Based on extensive research and numerous interviews with Saylor's colleagues and members of the conservationist community, Thomas G. Smith assembles the remarkable story of John Saylor, arguably the leading congressional conservationist of the twentieth century, and a major force in the preservation of America's wilderness.
While some students need more writing instruction than others, The Politics of Remediation reveals how that need also pertains to the institutions themselves. Mary Soliday argues that universities may need remedial English to alleviate their own crises in admissions standards, enrollment, mission, and curriculum, and English departments may use remedial programs to mediate their crises in enrollment, electives, and relationships to the liberal arts and professional schools.
Following a brief history of remedial English and the political uses of remediation at CCNY before, during, and after the open admissions policy, Soliday questions the ways in which students’ need for remedial writing instruction has become widely associated with the need to acculturate minorities to the university. In disentangling identity politics from remediation, she challenges a powerful assumption of post-structuralist work: that a politics of language use is equivalent to the politics of access to institutions.
This appealing memoir introduces the family of Charles Hart Spencer and his wife Mary Acheson: seven children born between 1884 and 1895. It also introduces a large Victorian house in Shadyside (a Pittsburgh neighborhood) and a middle-class way of life at the turn of the century.
Mr. Spencer, who worked—not very happily—for Henry Clay Frick, was one of the growing number of middle-management employees in American industrial cities in the 1880s and 1890s. His income, which supported his family of nine, a cook, two regular nurses, and at times a wet nurse and her baby, guaranteed a comfortable life but not a luxurious one. In the words of the editors, the Spencers represent a class that "too often stands silent or stereotyped as we rush forward toward the greater glamour of the robber barons or their immigrant workers."
Through the eyes of Ethel Spencer, the third daughter, we are led with warmth and humor through the routine of everyday life in this household: school, play, church on Sundays, illness, family celebrations, and vacations. Ethel was an observant child, with little sentimentality, and she wrote her memoir in later life as a professor of English with a gift for clear prose and the instincts of an anthropologist. As the editors observe, her memoir is "a fascinating insight into one kind of urban life of three generations ago."
At the Table of Power is both a cookbook and a culinary history that intertwines social issues, personal stories, and political commentary. Renowned culinary historian Diane M. Spivey offers a unique insight into the historical experience and cultural values of African America and America in general by way of the kitchen. From the rural country kitchen and steamboat floating palaces to marketplace street vendors and restaurants in urban hubs of business and finance, Africans in America cooked their way to positions of distinct superiority, and thereby indispensability. Despite their many culinary accomplishments, most Black culinary artists have been made invisible—until now. Within these pages, Spivey tells a powerful story beckoning and daring the reader to witness this culinary, cultural, and political journey taken hand in hand with the fight of Africans in America during the foundation years, from colonial slavery through the Reconstruction era. These narratives, together with the recipes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, expose the politics of the day and offer insight on the politics of today. African American culinary artists, Spivey concludes, have more than earned a rightful place at the table of culinary contribution and power.
Scholars of James Joyce offer critical analysis of his work Ulysses. Five essays interpret the character of the novel; four deal with the literary style of presentation, the last focuses on the problems of translation.
Contributors: Robert R. Boyle, S.J.; David Hayman; Richard M. Kain; Darcy O’Brien; Weldon Thornton; Erwin R. Steinberg; William M. Schutte; Fritz Senn; H. Frew Waidner; and the editors.
Given the tensions and demands of medicine, highly successful physicians and surgeons rarely achieve equal success as prose writers. It is truly extraordinary that a major, international pioneer in the controversial field of transplant surgery should have written a spellbinding, and heart-wrenching, autobiography.
Thomas Starzl grew up in LeMars, Iowa, the son of a newspaper publisher and a nurse. His father also wrote science fiction and was acquainted with the writer Ray Bradbury. Starzl left the family business to enter Northwestern University Medical School where he earned both and M.D. and a PhD. While he was a student, and later during his surgical internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, he began the series of animal experiments that led eventually to the world’s first transplantation of the human liver in 1963.
Throughout his career, first at the University of Colorado and then at the University of Pittsburgh, he has aroused both worldwide admiration and controversy. His technical innovations and medical genius have revolutionized the field, but Starzl has not hesitated to address the moral and ethical issues raised by transplantation. In this book he clearly states his position on many hotly debated issues including brain death, randomized trials for experimental drugs, the costs of transplant operations, and the system for selecting organ recipients from among scores of desperately ill patients.
There are many heroes in the story of transplantation, and many “puzzle people,” the patients who, as one journalist suggested, might one day be made entirely of various transplanted parts. They are old and young, obscure and world famous. Some have been taken into the hearts of America, like Stormie Jones, the brave and beautiful child from Texas. Every patient who receives someone else’s organ - and Starzl remembers each one - is a puzzle. “It was not just the acquisition of a new part,” he writes. “The rest of the body had to change in many ways before the gift could be accepted. It was necessary for the mind to see the world in a different way.” The surgeons and physicians who pioneered transplantation were also changed: they too became puzzle people. “Some were corroded or destroyed by the experience, some were sublimated, and none remained the same.”
Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century.
In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars’ willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated by a shift from behavioral to cognitive ethology (the science of animal behavior), and by attempts to affirm the essential similarities between the psychophysical makeup of human beings and animals.
Gary Steiner sketches the terms of the current debates about animals and relates these to their historical antecedents, focusing on both the dominant anthropocentric voices and those recurring voices that instead assert a fundamental kinship relation between human beings and animals. He concludes with a discussion of the problem of balancing the need to recognize a human indebtedness to animals and the natural world with the need to preserve a sense of the uniqueness and dignity of the human individual.
Hailed as “the most important congressman in the House of Representatives during the Civil War” and still honored in Pennsylvania as the father of its public school system, Thaddeus Stevens grappled in his day with many of the issues that confront us today: racial and economic equality, affirmative action, and equal access to education.
Volume one of the projected two-volume edition of The Papers of Thaddeus Stevens covers Steven’s political career from his Vermont youth to the end of the Civil War. It includes letters and speeches from his early days as a Gettysburg lawyer and as a representative in the Pennsylvania assembly through his antislavery efforts to the 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, freeing all slaves.
In May of 1976, documentary filmmaker and proclaimed socialist Raymundo Gleyzer mysteriously disappeared in Buenos Aires. Like many political activists, Gleyzer was the target of a brutalizing military junta that had recently assumed power. Amazingly, within a few decades, leftist filmmakers would be celebrated as intellectual vanguards in this same city.
In Transition Cinema, Jessica Stites Mor documents the critical role filmmakers, the film industry, and state regulators played in Argentina’s volatile transition to democracy. She shows how, during different regimes, the state moved to either inhibit or facilitate film production and its content, distribution, and exhibition. She also reveals the strategies the film industry employed to comply with, or circumvent these regulations.
Stites Mor divides the transition period into three distinct generations, each defined by a major political event and the reactions to these events in film. The first generation began with the failed civil uprising in Córdoba in 1969, and ended with the 1976 military takeover. During military rule, repressive censorship spurred underground exhibitions, and allied filmmakers with the Peronist left and radical activists. The second generation arose after the return of civilian rule in 1983. Buenos Aires became the center for state-level cultural programs that included filmmakers in debates over human rights and collective memory campaigns. In 1989, a third generation of filmmaking emerged, with new genres such as cine piquetero (picketer cinema) that portrayed a variety of social movements and brought them into the public eye. By the new millennium, Argentine filmmakers had gained the attention and financial support of international humanitarian and film industry organizations.
In this captivating study, Stites Mor examines how populist movements, political actors, filmmakers, government, and industry institutions all became deeply enmeshed in the project of Argentina’s transition cinema. She demonstrates how film emerged as the chronicler of political struggles in a dialogue with the past, present, and future, whose message transcended both cultural and national borders.
Constitutional principles at the core of the United States government divide authority between market and state and within the structure of the state itself. This diffusion of authority is valuable because it defends against the excesses of national government, causing federal policy initiatives to be more attuned to the concerns of local jurisdictions, and creating a context in which free enterprise may flourish.
However, this diffusion of authority weakens the control that federal officials enjoy over resources vital to the implementation of national policy. To implement their plans, federal policy formulators must often call upon autonomous participants such as state or local governments, advocacy groups, or commercial interests. When federal policy challenges the perspectives, interest, or priorities of these participants, they become reluctant partners. These implementation participants enjoy substantial autonomy, making their cooperation in pursuit of federal policy goals uncertain and difficult to achieve. How, then, can the federal government secure the cooperation it needs to implement policy when the act of implementation empowers potential adversaries?
Reluctant Partners explores these problems and proposes strategies to reduce the impediments to cooperation and promote policy coordination. Drawing upon theories of regime development and cooperation, Stoker suggests the “implementation regime framework” to analyze the difficulties of realizing cooperation in the implementation process. The framework is illustrated with numerous vignettes and two extensive case studies: the National School Lunch Program and federal nuclear waste disposal policy.
American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance presents an original critical and theoretical analysis of American Indian rhetorical practices in both canonical and previously overlooked texts: autobiographies, memoirs, prophecies, and oral storytelling traditions. Ernest Stromberg assembles essays from a range of academic disciplines that investigate the rhetorical strategies of Native American orators, writers, activists, leaders, and intellectuals.
The contributors consider rhetoric in broad terms, ranging from Aristotle's definition of rhetoric as “the faculty . . . of discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion,” to the ways in which Native Americans assimilated and revised Western rhetorical concepts and language to form their own discourse with European and American colonists. They relate the power and use of rhetoric in treaty negotiations, written accounts of historic conflicts and events, and ongoing relations between American Indian governments and the United States.
This is a groundbreaking collection for readers interested in Native American issues and the study of language. In presenting an examination of past and present Native American rhetoric, it emphasizes the need for an improved understanding of multicultural perspectives.
Paul Stronski tells the fascinating story of Tashkent, an ethnically diverse, primarily Muslim city that became the prototype for the Soviet-era reimagining of urban centers in Central Asia. Based on extensive research in Russian and Uzbek archives, Stronski shows us how Soviet officials, planners, and architects strived to integrate local ethnic traditions and socialist ideology into a newly constructed urban space and propaganda showcase.
The Soviets planned to transform Tashkent from a “feudal city” of the tsarist era into a “flourishing garden,” replete with fountains, a lakeside resort, modern roadways, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and of course, factories. The city was intended to be a shining example to the world of the successful assimilation of a distinctly non-Russian city and its citizens through the catalyst of socialism. As Stronski reveals, the physical building of this Soviet city was not an end in itself, but rather a means to change the people and their society.
Stronski analyzes how the local population of Tashkent reacted to, resisted, and eventually acquiesced to the city’s socialist transformation. He records their experiences of the Great Terror, World War II, Stalin’s death, and the developments of the Krushchev and Brezhnev eras up until the earthquake of 1966, which leveled large parts of the city. Stronski finds that the Soviets established a legitimacy that transformed Tashkent and its people into one of the more stalwart supporters of the regime through years of political and cultural changes and finally during the upheavals of glasnost.
Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Suárez, that expanse of ocean represents the state of exile, which he has imaginatively bridged in over two decades of compelling poetry.
"Whatever isn't voiced in time drowns," Suárez writes in "River Fable," and the urgency to articulate the complex yearnings of the displaced marks all the poems collected here. 90 Miles contains the best work from Suárez's six previous collections: You Come Singing, Garabato, In the Republic of Longing, Palm Crows, Banyan, and Guide to the Blue Tongue, as well as important new poems.
At once meditative, confessional, and political, Suárez's work displays the refracted nature of a life of exile spent in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. Connected through memory and desire, Caribbean palms wave over American junk mail. Cuban mangos rot on Miami hospital trays. William Shakespeare visits Havana. And the ones who left Cuba plant trees of reconciliation with the ones who stayed.
Courageously prolific, Virgil Suárez is one of the most important Latino writers of his generation.
Today, foreigners travel to the Yucatan for ruins, temples, and pyramids, white sand beaches and clear blue water. One hundred years ago, they went for cheap labor, an abundance of land, and the opportunity to make a fortune exporting cattle, henequen fiber, sugarcane, or rum. Sometimes they found death.
In 1875 an American plantation manager named Robert Stephens and a number of his workers were murdered by a band of Maya rebels. To this day, no one knows why. Was it the result of feuding between aristocratic families for greater power and wealth? Was it the foreseeable consequence of years of oppression and abuse of Maya plantation workers? Was a rebel leader seeking money and fame—or perhaps retribution for the loss of the woman he loved?
For whites, the events that took place at Xuxub, Stephens’s plantation, are virtually unknown, even though they engendered a diplomatic and legal dispute that vexed Mexican-U.S. relations for over six decades. The construction of "official" histories allowed the very name of Xuxub to die, much as the plantation itself was subsumed by the jungle. For the Maya, however, what happened at Xuxub is more than a story they pass down through generations—it is a defining moment in how they see themselves.
Sullivan masterfully weaves the intricately tangled threads of this story into a fascinating account of human accomplishments and failings, in which good and evil are never quite what they seem at first, and truth proves to be elusive. Xuxub Must Die seeks not only to fathom a mystery, but also to explore the nature of guilt, blame, and understanding.
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