This book is about some of the largest events of the twentieth century, about international war, economic collapse, new science and technologies, and about the transformation of an old mill town region into a modern American metropolis. But it sees those sweeping changes through the eyes of fourteen particular Bostonians, in an ambitious attempt to understand the disorienting experiences of recent history. These lives span the years from 1850 to 1980, a time when Boston, like all American cities, was being rebuilt according to the continually changing specifications of science, engineering, mass wealth, and big corporations.

From Boston Brahmins to self-made millionaires, Sam Warner, Jr., brings us into the diverse worlds of Robert Grant, judge and popular novelist; Mary Antin, mystic and advocate for immigrants; Fred Allen, radio comedian; Charles A. Stone and Edwin S. Webster, electrical engineers; Laura Elizabeth Richards, reformist clubwoman; Emily Greene Balch, economist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; William Madison Wood, textile magnate; Fred Erwin Beal, socialist labor organizer; Louise Andrews Kent, suburban housewife and writer; Vannevar Bush, science administrator; Laurence K. Marshall, electronics entrepreneur; James Bryant Conant, university president and educational reformer; and Rachel Carson, renowned science writer.

These varied lives have been deftly brought together to illuminate the many contradictory qualifies of today’s metropolitan life: ambitions for education and pervasive social neglect; conspicuous luxuries and endemic poverty; elaborate science and a poisoned environment; far-reaching cooperative networks of strangers and narrow, segregated neighborhoods; the multiplication of women’s roles and the entrapment of women in the home.

Individual experience—how one person lived as a child in a family and in a particular place, how people did their work—can bring renewed insight to the conflicts of modern life. This engrossing story speaks from an urge to recapture history through human lives and to examine its meaning as authentic experience. As Alfred Kazin expresses it, we are a nation of men and women who have endeavored to escape traditions, and therefore self-discovery is our preoccupation and delight.

In the last third of the nineteenth century Boston grew from a crowded merchant town, in which nearly everybody walked to work, to the modern divided metropolis. The street railway created this division of the metropolis into an inner city of commerce and slums and an outer city of commuters’ suburbs. Streetcar Suburbs tells who built the new city, and why, and how.

Included here is a new Introduction that considers the present suburb/city dichotomy and suggests what we can learn from it to assure a livable city of the future.

Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytales, and folktales explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly, objects speak, dreams reveal hidden truths, and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the wondrous tales of the Arabian Nights, their profound impact on the West, and the progressive exoticization of magic since the eighteenth century, when the first European translations appeared.

The Nights seized European readers' imaginations during the siècle des Lumières, inspiring imitations, spoofs, turqueries, extravaganzas, pantomimes, and mauresque tastes in dress and furniture. Writers from Voltaire to Goethe to Borges, filmmakers from Raoul Walsh on, and countless authors of children's books have adapted its stories. What gives these tales their enduring power to bring pleasure to readers and audiences? Their appeal, Marina Warner suggests, lies in how the stories' magic stimulates the creative activity of the imagination. Their popularity during the Enlightenment was no accident: dreams, projections, and fantasies are essential to making the leap beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge into new scientific and literary spheres. The magical tradition, so long disavowed by Western rationality, underlies modernity's most characteristic developments, including the charmed states of brand-name luxury goods, paper money, and psychoanalytic dream interpretation.

In Warner's hands, the Nights reveal the underappreciated cultural exchanges between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and cast light on the magical underpinnings of contemporary experience, where mythical principles, as distinct from religious belief, enjoy growing acceptance. These tales meet the need for enchantment, in the safe guise of oriental costume.

“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect.

In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, José Casanova, Nilüfer Göle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood.

Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age succeeds in conveying to readers the complexity of secularism while serving as an invaluable guide to a landmark book.

If a river runs through it, somewhere there is bound to be a bridge. Little in the landscape remains untouched by human hands, and every touch, from the simplest ditch to the most intricate monument, reveals a political decision or design. This is how Martin Warnke, one of Germany's leading art historians, looks at landscape in this book, which leads to a new way of seeing nature as we have appropriated, represented, and transformed it over time. Covering nearly a thousand years and most of western Europe, The Political Landscape provides a compelling summary history of modern humanity's ill-fated attempt to master nature.

Warnke finds evidence of the politicized landscape everywhere, on nature's own ground and in art, artifacts, and architecture, in features defined by the demands of conquest and defense, property rights and picturesque improvement, trade, tradition, communication, and commemoration. Whether considering the role of landscape in battle depictions, or investigating monumental figures from the Colossus of Rhodes to Mount Rushmore, or asking why gold backgrounds in paintings gave way to mountains topped with castles, Warnke reconfigures our idea of landscape, its significance, and its representations. The book sharpens our perceptions of nature in art and as art--a nature charged with symbol and meaning as a result of interventions by turns enlightened, insensitive, or, as now, dangerously corrosive.

African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literature—and to change the terms with which we discuss it.

Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

In Warren’s view, African American literature begged the question: what would happen to this literature if and when Jim Crow was finally overthrown? Thus, imagining a world without African American literature was essential to that literature. In support of this point, Warren focuses on three moments in the history of Phylon, an important journal of African American culture. In the dialogues Phylon documents, the question of whether race would disappear as an organizing literary category emerges as shared ground for critical and literary practice. Warren also points out that while scholarship by black Americans has always been the province of a petit bourgeois elite, the strictures of Jim Crow enlisted these writers in a politics that served the race as a whole.

Finally, Warren’s work sheds light on the current moment in which advocates of African American solidarity insist on a past that is more productively put behind us.

In these two essays, one of America’s most honored writers fastens on the interrelation of American democracy and poetry and the concept of selfhood vital to each. “I really don’t want to make a noise like a pundit,” Mr. Warren declares, “What I do want to do is to return us—and myself most of all—to a scrutiny of our own experience of our own world.” Indeed, Democracy and Poetry offers one of the most pertinent and strongly personal meditations on our condition to have appeared in recent letters.

Our native “poetry,” that is, literature and art, in general, is a social document, is “diagnostic,” and has often been a corrosive criticism of our democracy, Mr. Warren argues. Persuasively, and movingly, he shows that all of “art” and all that goes into the making of democracy require a free and responsible self. Yet the American experience has been one of the decay of the notion of self. Our astounding success jeopardized what we promised to create—the free man. For a century and a half the conception of the self has been dwindling, separating itself from traditional values, moral identity, and a secure relation with community. Lonely heroes in a bankrupt civilization, then protest, despair, aimlessness, and violence, have marked our literature.

The anguish of Robert Penn Warren’s own poetic vision of art and democracy is soothed only by his belief that poetry—the making of art can nourish and at least do something toward the rescue of democracy; he shows how art can be- come a healer, can be “therapeutic.” In the face of disintegrative forces set loose in a business and technetronic society, it is poetry that affirms the notion of the self. It is a model of the organized self, an emblem of the struggle for the achieving self, and of the self in a community. More and more as our modern technetronic society races toward the abolition of the self, and diverges from a culture created to enhance the notion of selfhood, poetry becomes indispensable.

Compelling, resonant, memorable, Democracy and Poetry is a major testament not only to the vitality of poetry, but also to a faith in democracy.

This collection of essays, which originally appeared as a book in 1962, is virtually the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine who died, at age 37, in 1955. Long before the rise of Cultural Studies as an academic pursuit, in the pages of the best literary magazines of the day, Robert Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life that were as sensitive and penetrating as the writings of James Agee, George Orwell, and Walter Benjamin. Some of these essays--notably "The Westerner," "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," and the pieces on the New Yorker, Mad Magazine, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and the Rosenberg letters--are classics, once frequently anthologized but now hard to find.

Along with a new preface by Stanley Cavell, The Immediate Experience includes several essays not previously published in the book--on Kafka and Hemingway--as well as Warshow's side of an exchange with Irving Howe.

"'Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?' 'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.' 'The dog did nothing in the night-time.' 'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes." The quotation from A. Conan Doyle with which this book begins, is a delightfully appropriate summation of the authors' point of view garnered from their fifteen years of experiments on the psychology of reasoning.

Dr. Wason and Dr. Johnson-Laird are intrigued by the extent to which most individuals can be considered naturally rational thinkers. They present here the surprising results of their comprehensive investigations of how humans draw explicit conclusions from evidence. "Given a set of assertions," the authors write, "to what extent can the individual appreciate all that follows from them by virtue of logic alone, and remain unseduced by plausible, but fallacious conclusions? We are not concerned with whether these assertions are true or false, nor with whether the individual holds them among his beliefs, nor with whether they are sane or silly."

At the core of the Psychology of Reasoning is a vigorous discussion that incorporates various illustrations--some of them humorous, all of them fascinating--of the use of reason under a wide variety of different conditions. Particular emphasis is placed on the difficulties involved in dealing with negatively marked information that must be combined and used with other information for reaching conclusions. Thorough treatment is given as well to the search for plausible contexts that will render anomalous or ambiguous statements "sensible."

The authors have strived to isolate the components of inference, the basic steps of any kind of deductive activity, in order to determine the psychological processes involved in them. What has been the outcome of this research? Dr. Wason and Dr. Johnson-Laird conclude, "our research has suggested that the individual's logical competence may be either enhanced or limited by performance variables. And, of these, content has turned out to be vitally important for revealing, or obscuring structure. At best, we can all think like logicians; at worst, logicians all think like us."

The detective work of art history—recreating the past with visual clues and often scanty documentation—becomes particularly challenging in the case of cast sculpture since the nineteenth century. Increasing popular demand for small versions of well-known monuments, and technical advances which made mass production of sculpture available for the first time, tempted nineteenth-century artists to profitably reproduce their works. Collectors, dealers, and scholars today are faced with the problem of unraveling the histories of the legions of reproductions left behind.

Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture confronts the question of originality through visual comparison of similar works brought together, possibly for the first time. Groups of sculptures by Houdon, Barye, Carpeaux, Rodin, Saint-Gaudens, and Daniel Chester French are considered. Problems of quality and the obvious or subtle changes in the character of a sculpture as it is changed in size, translated into other materials, or cast from other casts must all be faced in the evaluation of a serial piece. Here technical specialists have joined with art scholars to retrace the evolution of each series from the artist’s original concept to its final edition, in many cases long after the sculptor’s death.

After two years of consultation and correspondence with almost seventy lenders, the Fogg Museum at Harvard chose more than one hundred objects for first-hand study. Then Professor Jacques de Caso, who wrote the historical and legal introduction, and six other authorities on the sculptors traveled to Cambridge to confront the objects and consult with Jeanne Wasserman. The material in these chapters is a synthesis of the knowledge and insights contributed by both technical specialists and art historians.

In May 1941, Gertrude van Tijn arrived in Lisbon on a mission of mercy from German-occupied Amsterdam. She came with Nazi approval to the capital of neutral Portugal to negotiate the departure from Hitler’s Europe of thousands of German and Dutch Jews. Was this middle-aged Jewish woman, burdened with such a terrible responsibility, merely a pawn of the Nazis, or was her journey a genuine opportunity to save large numbers of Jews from the gas chambers? In such impossible circumstances, what is just action, and what is complicity?

A moving account of courage and of all-too-human failings in the face of extraordinary moral challenges, The Ambiguity of Virtue tells the story of Van Tijn’s work on behalf of her fellow Jews as the avenues that might save them were closed off. Between 1933 and 1940 Van Tijn helped organize Jewish emigration from Germany. After the Germans occupied Holland, she worked for the Nazi‐appointed Jewish Council in Amsterdam and enabled many Jews to escape. Some later called her a heroine for the choices she made; others denounced her as a collaborator.

Bernard Wasserstein’s haunting narrative draws readers into the twilight world of wartime Europe, to expose the wrenching dilemmas that confronted Jews under Nazi occupation. Gertrude van Tijn’s experience raises crucial questions about German policy toward the Jews, about the role of the Jewish Council, and about Dutch, American, and British responses to the persecution and mass murder of Jews on an unimaginable scale.

In 1939 there were ten million Jews in Europe. After Hitler there were four million. Today in 1996 there are under two million. On current projections the Jews will become virtually extinct as a significant element in European society over the course of the twenty-first century. Now, in the first comprehensive social and political history of the experience and fate of European Jews during the last fifty years, Bernard Wasserstein sheds light on the reasons for this dire demographic projection.

Drawing on a rich variety of sources, many hitherto unpublished, Wasserstein begins with the painful years of liberation after World War II when Jews tried to recover from the destruction of their people and communities, then traces the Jewish experience in Eastern and Western Europe in different national and ideological contexts. His important and original inquiry covers the impact on Jews of postwar reconstruction, Soviet occupation, the Cold War, and the collapse of communism. These, combined with the memory of Nazi genocide, the persistence of antisemitism, the development of Israel, and the Middle East conflicts, shaped the history of European Jewry in the second half of the twentieth century.

With exceptional eloquence and conviction, Vanishing Diaspora argues that survival for European Jews ultimately will depend on choices they themselves make to reverse trends. They have an alarmingly imbalanced death-to-birth ratio, and many have jettisoned religious observance in the spirit of a secular Europe, losing their cultural distinctiveness as well as their numbers. This often painful story of destruction, irreparable loss, and the shattering of ties thus serves as a wake-up call and a dramatic warning.

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by the Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace.

Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of the Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.

In The Expedition of Cyrus, the Western world's first eyewitness account of a military campaign, Xenophon told how, in 401 B.C., a band of unruly Greek mercenaries traveled east to fight for the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger in his attempt to wrest the throne of the mighty Persian empire from his brother.

With this first masterpiece of Western military history forming the backbone of his book, Robin Waterfield explores what remains unsaid and assumed in Xenophon's account—much about the gruesome nature of ancient battle and logistics, the lives of Greek and Persian soldiers, and questions of historical, political, and personal context, motivation, and conflicting agendas. The result is a rounded version of the story of Cyrus's ill-fated march and the Greeks' perilous retreat--a nuanced and dramatic perspective on a critical moment in history that may tell us as much about our present-day adventures in the Middle East, site of Cyrus's debacle and the last act of the Golden Age, as it does about the great powers of antiquity in a volatile period of transition.

Just as Xenophon brought the thrilling, appalling expedition to life, Waterfield evokes Xenophon himself as a man of his times—reflecting for all time invaluable truths about warfare, overweaning ambition, the pitfalls of power, and the march of history.

Out-of-control costs. Box office bombs that should have been foreseen. A mania for sequels at the expense of innovation. Blockbusters of ever-diminishing merit. What other industry could continue like this--and succeed as spectacularly as Hollywood has? The American movie industry's extraordinary success at home and abroad--in the face of dire threats from broadcast television and a wealth of other entertainment media that have followed--is David Waterman's focus in this book, the first full-length economic study of the movie industry in over forty years.

Combining historical and economic analysis, Hollywood's Road to Riches shows how, beginning in the 1950s, a largely predictable business has been transformed into a volatile and complex multimedia enterprise now commanding over 80 percent of the world's film business. At the same time, the book asks how the economic forces leading to this success--the forces of audience demand, technology, and high risk--have combined to change the kinds of movies Hollywood produces.

Waterman argues that the movie studios have multiplied their revenues by effectively using pay television and home video media to extract the maximum amounts that individual consumers are willing to pay to watch the same movies in different venues. Along the way, the Hollywood studios have masterfully handled piracy and other economic challenges to the multimedia system they use to distribute movies.

The author also looks ahead to what Internet file sharing and digital production and distribution technologies might mean for Hollywood's prosperity, as well as for the quality and variety of the movies it makes.

The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is considered a great success. Many of these adoptive citizens have prospered, including General Colin Powell. But Mary Waters tells a very different story about immigrants from the West Indies, especially their children.

She finds that when the immigrants first arrive, their knowledge of English, their skills and contacts, their self-respect, and their optimistic assessment of American race relations facilitate their integration into the American economic structure. Over time, however, the realities of American race relations begin to swamp their positive cultural values. Persistent, blatant racial discrimination soon undermines the openness to whites the immigrants have when they first arrive. Discrimination in housing channels them into neighborhoods with inadequate city services and high crime rates. Inferior public schools undermine their hopes for their children's future. Low wages and poor working conditions are no longer attractive for their children, who use American and not Caribbean standards to measure success.

Ultimately, the values that gained these first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life in the United States. In many families, the hard-won relative success of the parents is followed by the downward slide of their children. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.

Listen to a short interview with Mary WatersHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Salsa has replaced ketchup as the most popular condiment. A mosque has been erected around the corner. The local hospital is staffed by Indian doctors and Philippine nurses, and the local grocery store is owned by a Korean family. A single elementary school may include students who speak dozens of different languages at home. This is a snapshot of America at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, shaped by successive waves of new arrivals. The most recent transformation began when immigration laws and policies changed significantly in 1965, admitting migrants from around the globe in new numbers and with widely varying backgrounds and aspirations.

This comprehensive guide, edited and written by an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars, provides an authoritative account of the most recent surge of immigrants. Twenty thematic essays address such topics as immigration law and policy, refugees, unauthorized migrants, racial and ethnic identity, assimilation, nationalization, economy, politics, religion, education, and family relations. These are followed by comprehensive articles on immigration from the thirty most significant nations or regions of origin. Based on the latest U.S. Census data and the most recent scholarly research, The New Americans is an essential reference for students, scholars, and anyone curious about the changing face of America.

Japanese local history is used as an ingredient in historiographical theories designed to prove that the rapid pace of change in Japan led either to phenomenal success or to dismal failure. Against the backdrop of a comprehensive overview of Japanese historiography, Neil Waters examines in detail the local politics of the Kawasaki region during the late nineteenth century. Historians have hitherto focused primarily upon those regions that experienced violent peasant uprisings, class conflict, or extreme government repression. He points out that localities which survived the transition between governments without violence far outnumber those marked by open struggle.

This study is one of the few to cover the political and economic history of a region in which “nothing happened.” From an examination of the implementation and impact of Restoration programs on the day-to-day level of local government in the Kawasaki region, a fascinating picture emerges of the adaptation and modifications local leaders were able to chart between open rebellion and outright capitulation.

One of the most visited sites in Italy, the Roman Forum is also one of the best-known wonders of the Roman world. Though a highpoint on the tourist route around Rome, for many visitors the site can be a baffling disappointment. Several of the monuments turn out to be nineteenth- or twentieth-century reconstructions, while the rubble and the holes made by archaeologists have an unclear relationship to the standing remains, and, to all but the most skilled Romanists, the Forum is an unfortunate mess.

David Watkin sheds completely new light on the Forum, examining the roles of the ancient remains while revealing what exactly the standing structures embody—including the rarely studied medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque churches, as well as the nearby monuments that have important histories of their own. Watkin asks the reader to look through the veneer of archaeology to rediscover the site as it was famous for centuries. This involves offering a remarkable and engaging new vision of a well-visited, if often misunderstood, wonder. It will be enjoyed by readers at home and serve as a guide in the Forum.

A pyramid in front of the Louvre. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and The Rite of Spring. Schoenberg and Shirley Temple. Just as the odd juxtapositions of Modernism produced a new way of seeing, so now collage, in the hands of Glenn Watkins, offers a new perspective on the art of our age. A rich and revealing picture of twentieth-century music and the arts, Watkins' work shows us what our present Postmodern aesthetic owes to our Modernist past.

Behind the many guises of Modernism we find an appetite for opposing impulses: the exotic and the home-grown, high and low, black and white, the passionate and the cool, the cerebral and the instinctive. Watkins shows us these oppositions at play in the music of Stravinsky and Ravel, Debussy and Schoenberg, Ives, Satie, Hindemith, Ellington, and Gershwin, in the art of Picasso and the Cubists, Cocteau, Léger, Brancusi and Noguchi, in the anthologies of Nancy Cunard and Main Locke, in the ballet companies of Sergei Diaghilev and Rolf de Math, and in the performances of josephine Baker. Throughout, collage asserts its power to enlighten through juxtaposition, resist resolution, sponsor pluralism, and promote understanding of an order that eludes all edicts.

The masks of Oskar Schlemmer, of japanese No drama, and of the commedia dell'arte, the mythologies attendant to the retrieval of folk traditions and the emergence of jazz, and the mass relocation of artists in a time of war-all have a place in this depiction and assessment of the legacy of Modernism. A heady exploration of questions surrounding Primitivism, Orientalism, and technology as they surface at either end of our century, this book exposes the millennial preoccupations mutually invested in our search for "first times" and our convictions about "the end of culture"

This wide-ranging book is a comparative study of the civil law, primarily the legal systems of western continental Europe and Latin America. It attempts to account for the distinctive features of civil law systems and hence to contribute to an understanding of the forces that cause law to change. The author contends that the basic differences between civil-law and common-law systems derive from legal history rather than from social, economic, or political developments. Above all, he argues, it was the acceptance of the authority of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis that determined the future nature of civil-law systems and gave them their distinctive character.

Mr. Watson outlines the features of Roman law as codified by Justinian that made it adaptable in countries with widely differing political systems, social structures, and local court practices. His learned and lucid exposition encompasses the role and influence of professors of Roman law in medieval universities; the manner and extent to which the case law of various countries drew upon the Corpus Juris; the role of the Institutes as a model for the institutes of local law which were the immediate ancestors of most of the national codes; and the effect of the Corpus Juris on basic features of the civil law, such as the fundamental division between public and private law, with different courts for the two, and the separation of commercial law from the rest of private law.

Scholars may debate his thesis, but none will dispute Alan Watson's command of the sources and his mastery of legal material spanning many centuries and countries. His book will present a challenge to legal historians and students of comparative law, and it will provide Anglo-American lawyers with insight into the nature of civil-law systems.

This provocative study provides a radically new perspective on Ben Jonson's comedies. Robert Watson's theory of the “parodic strategy” offers a solution to many of the most perplexing cruxes of Jonson criticism. By betraying the expectations of his characters and his audience, Jonson subsumes and chastises his rival playwrights, and seizes territory within the dramatic genre for his special form of satiric city-comedy.

He builds his complex plots out of the wreckage of more conventional works, in a way that allows him to criticize and combat not only his literary competitors, but also the histrionic tendencies of Renaissance English society. This view of Jonson's notorious borrowings has broad implications for the staging and editing of the comedies, as well as for scholarly criticism. It reveals a Jonson who is more coherent, more consistently funny, and more modernistically aware of the conventions and paradoxes of his medium than has generally been supposed. Watson's approach allows him to reorient major comedies such as Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, and to rehabilitate the later works that have commonly been dismissed as “dotages.” Ben Jonson's Parodic Strategy thus provides fresh and vivid insights into Jonson's changing attitudes toward popular culture and toward his own censorious critical persona.

What is ambition, and what are its consequences, in Shakespearean drama? This compelling interpretation of eight major plays reveals a Shakespeare who understands ambition as a doomed but necessary struggle against the limitations of the inherited self. Through vivid new readings of such crucial moments as Henry V's rejection of Falstaff, Macbeth's defeat by the advancing Birnam Wood, and Coriolanus' crisis at the gates of Rome, Robert Watson delineates a pattern of poetic justice whereby characters who disdain their places in nature's system forfeit the benefits that nature normally offers. Watson also amends the insights of psychoanalytic critics by demonstrating that Shakespeare uses Oedipal impulses and unnatural births as metaphors for the forbidden act of remaking the self: conceiving a new identity entails a symbolically incestuous defiance of the father's authority.

By tracing the evolution of this Shakespearean myth of ambition and exploring its analogues in many less familiar Renaissance texts, Watson illuminates the ethical perspective of the playwright and provides a bold new approach to the sexual symbolism of the plays. The persistence of the mythic pattern across different types of play (history, tragedy, and romance) and different modes of aspiration (political, martial, and spiritual) indicates that Shakespeare perceives ambition as a moral and dramatic problem in its own right, with its own special properties and its own weighty ambiguities.

,The scientific correspondence of Watt, Black, Robison and others, together with James Watt's notebook of experiments on heat, edited by Eric Robinson and Douglas McKie.,

, The close friendship that grew up between Dr. Joseph Black, the,discoverer of specific and latent heats, and James Watt, the scientific instrument maker who was destined to become perhaps the greatest engineer of all time, is in,itself a dramatic relationship, not before fully appreciated, Here for the first time is the full text of all their surviving correspondence, known only fragmentarily before in J. P. Muirhead's Life and Mechanical Inventions of James Watt, and there rather freely amended by the editor.,

The amazing range of Watt's interests--in the firing of delft and stoneware, the manufacture of alkali from salt, the invention of scientific instruments as well as the copying press, and many other matters beside the steam-engine--is revealed here. Watt's own position as a scientist and the quality of his association with Black in further experiments on latent heat are fully documented. But the,correspondence is also valuable for the light it sheds on many aspects of life in Britain in the later half of the eighteenth century.

In addition, Watt's notebook on his experiments on heat, known before only through quotation, is presented complete. This is a primary source of first-rate importance to the historian of science.

Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin.

Depicted at the time as a postwar measure related to the demobilization of defeated Japanese soldiers, this population transfer was a central element in the human dismantling of the Japanese empire that resonates with other post-colonial and post-imperial migrations in the twentieth century.

Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan. Through an exploration of the creation and uses of the figure of the repatriate, in political, social, and cultural realms, this study addresses the question of what happens when empire comes home.

"The major theme of Chapter 12, new to this edition, is the missed opportunities for the parties in the 1996 elections. The year started with a highly visible confrontation over the budget that could have revitalized the party coalitions if the issues had been carried over to the election. However, the candidate-centered campaign of 1996 ultimately did little to resolve these issues or to reinvigorate partisanship in the electorate. In spite of the opportunities for getting new voters to the polls created by the Motor Voter Act, voter turnout in 1996 was the lowest since 1924. Turning out the vote is one of the most crucial functions of political parties, and their inability to mobalize more than half of the eligible electorate strongly indicates their future decline in importance to voters. Until citizens support the parties more by showing up to cast votes for their candidates, the decline of American political parties must be considered to be an ongoing phenomenon."

--From the preface

Every presidential election since 1964 has been won by the candidate backed by the most united party; yet as party unity has become more important to voting decisions, it has also become increasingly difficult to achieve. In his latest book, Martin Wattenberg offers an in-depth interpretation of the presidential elections of the 1980s, illuminating current theories of political behavior and how they operate in today's candidate-centered politics.

Wattenberg investigates the impact that political parties' declining relevance has had on presidential politics. As the parties' ability to polarize opinion weakened and voters were set politically adrift, the candidates themselves had to fill the power vacuum. Interestingly, as the candidates have become more prominent, their popularity has spiraled downward. Wattenberg's national survey data debunks the notion of Reagan as the "teflon president;' demonstrating that many negative judgments stuck to Reagan's public image throughout the 1980s, particularly the criticisms of his conservative policies.

The author's intricate analysis shows that many people were torn between candidates whose policies they preferred and those who they thought would produce the best results, and these contradictory attitudes were primarily resolved in favor of Reagan and Bush.

This book is not only the successor volume to the author's widely used book on American parties, it is also a controversial and thought-provoking commentary on American parties, politics, and representative government.

As the confusion over the ballots in Florida in 2000 demonstrated, American elections are complex and anything but user-friendly. This phenomenon is by no means new, but with the weakening of political parties in recent decades and the rise of candidate-centered politics, the high level of complexity has become ever more difficult for many citizens to navigate. Thus the combination of complex elections and the steady decline of the party system has led to a decline in voter turnout.

In this timely book, Martin Wattenberg confronts the question of what low participation rates mean for democracy. At the individual level, turnout decline has been highest among the types of people who most need to have electoral decisions simplified for them through a strong party system--those with the least education, political knowledge, and life experience.

As Wattenberg shows, rather than lamenting how many Americans fail to exercise their democratic rights, we should be impressed with how many arrive at the polls in spite of a political system that asks more of a typical person than is reasonable. Meanwhile, we must find ways to make the American electoral process more user-friendly.

If the poor are always with us, how we have perceived and treated them has changed like the seasons. Such was the massive and pitiless industrialization of the nation after the Civil War that Josephine Shaw Lowell (1843-1905) recoiled and sought a new way to approach poverty. She rationalized charity toward hapless families and children in ways that established social responsibility for the welfare of the poor. This introduction of "scientific" methods in social work bridged two great eras of social reform, creating a civic maternalism only denied in law in 1996.

A Brahmin, member of an illustrious family, sister of the martyred Robert Gould Shaw, who led his proud black troops against Fort Wagner, and, later, a war widow, Lowell constantly responded to changing ideological and economic conditions affecting the poor. From an emphasis on the regeneration of the individual, she soon showed an appreciation of the importance of social conditions.

This book challenges all previous interpretations of Lowell as a "genteel" reformer mostly interested in social control of the underclass. Rather, her aim was to cure pauperism, and her strategies eventually led her to support higher wages and full employment.

“Boys are emotionally illiterate and don’t want intimate friendships.” In this empirically grounded challenge to our stereotypes about boys and men, Niobe Way reveals the intense intimacy among teenage boys especially during early and middle adolescence. Boys not only share their deepest secrets and feelings with their closest male friends, they claim that without them they would go “wacko.” Yet as boys become men, they become distrustful, lose these friendships, and feel isolated and alone.

Drawing from hundreds of interviews conducted throughout adolescence with black, Latino, white, and Asian American boys, Deep Secrets reveals the ways in which we have been telling ourselves a false story about boys, friendships, and human nature. Boys’ descriptions of their male friendships sound more like “something out of Love Story than Lord of the Flies.” Yet in late adolescence, boys feel they have to “man up” by becoming stoic and independent. Vulnerable emotions and intimate friendships are for girls and gay men. “No homo” becomes their mantra.

These findings are alarming, given what we know about links between friendships and health, and even longevity. Rather than a “boy crisis,” Way argues that boys are experiencing a “crisis of connection” because they live in a culture where human needs and capacities are given a sex (female) and a sexuality (gay), and thus discouraged for those who are neither. Way argues that the solution lies with exposing the inaccuracies of our gender stereotypes and fostering these critical relationships and fundamental human skills.

Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history. These rivers can shape a city’s success or cause its destruction. At the same time, city-building reshapes rivers and their landscapes. Cities have harnessed, modified, and engineered rivers, altering ecologies and creating new landscapes in the process of urbanization. Rivers are also shaped by the development of cities as urban landscapes, just as the cities are shaped by their relationship to the river.

In the river city, the city river is a dynamic contributor to the urban landscape with its flow of urban economies, geographies, and cultures. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. Building on emerging interest in the resilience of cities, this book and the original symposium consider river cities and city rivers to explore how histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future.

Garden as Art: Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks features essays and photographs of this remarkable landscape as a living and breathing work of art. Published on the occasion of the centennial of the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in 2021, the book illuminates the stewardship of one of the most beautiful gardens on earth.

Edited by Thaïsa Way, this volume includes essays from scholars and practitioners as well as photographs by landscape photographer Sahar Coston-Hardy. The essays place the garden in the context of its historical surroundings, explore its archival significance, and reflect on its effects on the world of contemporary design. Accompanying the essays is a collection of newly commissioned photographs by Coston-Hardy that document the seasons and growth in the gardens over the course of a year and that invite the reader to contemplate the art of garden design and the remarkable beauty of the natural world. Archival images of the gardens offer a chronicle of evolving design concepts as well as illustrate how gardens change over time as living works of art. Garden as Art offers an inspiring view of a place that has been remarkably influential in design and the art of landscape architecture.

Francis Wayland's The Elements of Moral Science, first published in 1835, was one of the most widely used and influential American textbooks of the nineteenth century. Direct and simple in its presentation, the book was more a didactic manual than a philosophic discussion of ethical problems. But because of its success, and because it set the tone and form for so much educational writing that was to follow, this first important American textbook in moral philosophy is now of great value as a document in the history of education.

The book grew naturally out of the lectures Wayland prepared for the senior course in moral philosophy he taught as President of Brown University beginning in 1827. Courses of this kind were common at the time. As an undergraduate at Union College, Wayland himself had taken one under President Eliphalet Nott, who was to become his lifelong supporter. Loosely organized, such courses gave the college president, most often interested in the training of character rather than in learning for its own sake, an opportunity to impress his personality and moral views on the seniors before turning them out in the world. Wayland's course at Brown, less rambling than many, was described by a former student as "one garden spot in the waste of the curriculum."

In his lectures and, finally, in his book, Wayland stood in opposition to the utilitarian ethics of the eighteenth century which based moral judgments on the consequences of men's acts. He held instead that conscience was a faculty directing man's actions in accordance with moral law. Wayland developed this idea in the first part of his book, called "Theoretical Ethics." In the second part, "Practical Ethics," he established three working principles: the eternal validity of moral law as revealed in the Scriptures, the right of private judgment in accordance with Protestant tradition, and the Jeffersonian republican limitation of the powers of government. These he then applied to moral practice, vindicating and validating the desirable virtues of justice, veracity, chastity, and benevolence.

One section of Wayland's otherwise inoffensive text turned out to be highly controversial. Under the heading "Personal Liberty" he discussed the question of slavery, coming at length to the conclusion that the duty of masters to slaves was to free them, while the duty of slaves to masters was to obey them and be faithful to them. In the climate of that time, his recommendation to leave action to the Christian conscience of the individual master was no more acceptable to the growing abolitionist sentiment of the North than to the defensive, proslavery feeling of the South. The Elements of Moral Science went on, nevertheless, to a long and popular life, going through several revisions (in which the slavery section was progressively altered) as well as translations, and selling 100,000 copies by the end of the century.

Francis Wayland (1796-1865), Mr. Blau writes, stands as 'a central figure in the first great movement for reform of education in the United States." Ordained first as a minister, he served as President of Brown from 1827 to 1855, advocating a wider, more liberal, more practical curriculum at a time when courses of study were still tightly bound to the classics. In politics anti-expansionist, and a pacifist by conviction, he bitterly opposed the Mexican War and the admission of Texas. His opposition to slavery gradually increased until, on the outbreak of the Civil War, he could write, "Can it be doubted on which side God will declare himself?... The best place to meet a difficulty is just where God puts it. If we dodge it, it will come in a worse place..."

This text reproduces the 1837 revision of The Elements of Moral Science. Minor variations from other editions are included as footnotes. Variant versions of longer passages are carried in full in appendices.

Here is a brief but comprehensive tour of the physiology of vision, guided by one of the grand masters of the discipline. Offering first a solid grounding in structure and function, the book emphasizes those areas that the author considers to be of most significance in current research. Much attention is given to the role of vision in circadian timekeeping, the development of the visual system, the effect of aging on the eye, and the provocative questions of perception and illusion.

An eminently readable text, Focus on Vision will more than satisfy the needs of students in ophthalmology, optometry, physiological optics, biology, psychology, and art. It is fully illustrated and contains lists of references and further reading. The questions at the end of each chapter may be used to test understanding or simply to excite discussion.

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION..

In 2001 a panel representing virtually all the world's governments and climate scientists announced that they had reached a consensus: the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last ten millennia, and that warming was caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases from human activity. The consensus itself was at least a century in the making. The story of how scientists reached their conclusion--by way of unexpected twists and turns and in the face of formidable intellectual, financial, and political obstacles--is told for the first time in The Discovery of Global Warming. Spencer R. Weart lucidly explains the emerging science, introduces us to the major players, and shows us how the Earth's irreducibly complicated climate system was mirrored by the global scientific community that studied it.

Unlike familiar tales of Science Triumphant, this book portrays scientists working on bits and pieces of a topic so complex that they could never achieve full certainty--yet so important to human survival that provisional answers were essential. Weart unsparingly depicts the conflicts and mistakes, and how they sometimes led to fruitful results. His book reminds us that scientists do not work in isolation, but interact in crucial ways with the political system and with the general public. The book not only reveals the history of global warming, but also analyzes the nature of modern scientific work as it confronts the most difficult questions about the Earth's future.

The award-winning book is now revised and expanded.

In 2001 an international panel of distinguished climate scientists announced that the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last ten millennia, and that warming was caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases from human activity. The story of how scientists reached that conclusion—by way of unexpected twists and turns—was the story Spencer Weart told in The Discovery of Global Warming. Now he brings his award-winning account up to date, revised throughout to reflect the latest science and with a new conclusion that shows how the scientific consensus caught fire among the general world public, and how a new understanding of the human meaning of climate change spurred individuals and governments to action.

Our thinking is inhabited by images-images of sometimes curious and overwhelming power. The mushroom cloud, weird rays that can transform the flesh, the twilight world following a nuclear war, the white city of the future, the brilliant but mad scientist who plots to destroy the world-all these images and more relate to nuclear energy, but that is not their only common bond. Decades before the first atom bomb exploded, a web of symbols with surprising linkages was fully formed in the public mind. The strange kinship of these symbols can be traced back, not only to medieval symbolism, but still deeper into experiences common to all of us.

This is a disturbing book: it shows that much of what we believe about nuclear energy is not based on facts, but on a complex tangle of imagery suffused with emotions and rooted in the distant past. Nuclear Fear is the first work to explore all the symbolism attached to nuclear bombs, and to civilian nuclear energy as well, employing the powerful tools of history as well as findings from psychology, sociology, and even anthropology. The story runs from the turn of the century to the present day, following the scientists and journalists, the filmmakers and novelists, the officials and politicians of many nations who shaped the way people think about nuclear devices. The author, a historian who also holds a Ph.D. in physics, has been able to separate genuine scientific knowledge about nuclear energy and radiation from the luxuriant mythology that obscures them. In revealing the history of nuclear imagery, Weart conveys the hopeful message that once we understand how this imagery has secretly influenced history and our own thinking, we can move on to a clearer view of the choices that confront our civilization.

After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy.

Building on his classic, Nuclear Fear, Weart follows nuclear imagery from its origins in the symbolism of medieval alchemy to its appearance in film and fiction. Long before nuclear fission was discovered, fantasies of the destroyed planet, the transforming ray, and the white city of the future took root in the popular imagination. At the turn of the twentieth century when limited facts about radioactivity became known, they produced a blurred picture upon which scientists and the public projected their hopes and fears. These fears were magnified during the Cold War, when mushroom clouds no longer needed to be imagined; they appeared on the evening news. Weart examines nuclear anxiety in sources as diverse as Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, and the television show The Simpsons.

Recognizing how much we remain in thrall to these setpieces of the imagination, Weart hopes, will help us resist manipulation from both sides of the nuclear debate.

A small group of scientists in Paris was among the first in the world to take nuclear fission dead seriously. During one extraordinary year the team wrote a secret patent, sketched a workable device, and persuaded government and industry to underwrite their research.

The year was 1939.

The secret patent was a crude uranium bomb.

The device was a nuclear reactor.

Spencer Weart tells the astonishing story of how a few individuals at laboratory benches unleashed a power that has transformed our world. Weart's riveting account of the origins of nuclear energy--the first to be written by an author who is both physicist and historian--follows developments from Marie Curie's experiments with radium to the late 1940s when her son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, launched France's atomic energy program, opening the age of nuclear arms proliferation. Focusing on the French work, which was often only days or even hours apart from similar breakthroughs in the United States and elsewhere, the author probes all parts of the discovery process. He covers not only the crucial steps from laboratory experiment to working reactor and bomb, but also the wider campaign of these French scientist-politicians to secure funds and materials on an unheard-of scale and to govern the outcome of their work through secrecy and patents. A rounded portrait of the French team's interaction with the rest of society, Scientists in Power reveals the close connections among laboratory breakthroughs, industrial and military interests, and the flow of politics and ideology.

The account ranges from lucid explanation of the technical challenges overcome by the scientists to suspenseful stories of escape and covert operations in World War II, such as the airlifting of hundreds of pounds of "heavy water" from Norway to France under the nose of an alerted Luftwaffe. Among the contributions of these scientists, who laid much of the groundwork for the Manhattan Project, are new perceptions about the sociology and politics of science. In short, Scientists in Power affords an outstandingly clear and readable exploration of the relations among science, society, and technology--relations at the fulcrum of modern history.

The redistribution of income has been a key element in Peruvian governmental policy. Both the Belaunde and Velasco regimes professed a deep concern with economic injustice, and they have been regarded as models of peaceful progress toward social justice. Despite its good intentions, Richard Webb shows, the government has had little impact on the rigid imbalance of wealth in Peru. The rich have continued to get richer faster than the poor have got less poor. Inequality has grown, and those most in need of improvement have benefited least. The tax structure has actually become more regressive. with taxes raised most on middle-income groups and least on the very rich.

Overall, the Peruvian government's economic policy has been mildly progressive, but not progressive enough to have an appreciable effect on the widespread poverty. What is needed, Webb argues, are movements of capital from the modern sector of the economy to the traditional sector to create new jobs for the poor. "Finally, substantial redistribution seems to require changes in attitude. The elimination of poverty must precede a concern for equity per se, and the needs of the very poor must acquire the status of rights rather than claims to compassion."

Compared to the wealth of information available to us about classical tragedy and comedy, not much is known about the culture of pantomime, mime, and dance in late antiquity. Charges of obscenity and polemical anti-theater discourse have, at times, erased these popular performance traditions from the modern imagination. Demons and Dancers returns us to the times and places where those great ancient theaters were more than picturesque ruins dotting the Mediterranean landscape.

Ruth Webb fills this gap in our knowledge of the ancient world and provides us with a richly detailed look at social life in the late antique period through an investigation of its performance culture. The book focuses on the eastern empire, from Greece proper to modern-day Turkey and Egypt, between the second and sixth centuries CE. Using some of the tools provided by modern performance theory, this book explains how audiences interpreted the actions on stage, how the status of male and female performers shifted across time and place, how skilled the actors actually were (it was commonplace to dismiss these performers for their lack of skill), and what role spectacles involving spoken and sung words, as well as stylized gestures, had in Greco-Roman civic life.

When Steven Burd, CEO of the supermarket chain Safeway, cut wages and benefits, starting a five-month strike by 59,000 unionized workers, he was confident he would win. But where traditional labor action failed, a novel approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, a $300 billion pension fund, workers led a shareholder revolt that unseated three of Burd’s boardroom allies.

In The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon, David Webber uses cases such as Safeway’s to shine a light on labor’s most potent remaining weapon: its multitrillion-dollar pension funds. Outmaneuvered at the bargaining table and under constant assault in Washington, state houses, and the courts, worker organizations are beginning to exercise muscle through markets. Shareholder activism has been used to divest from anti-labor companies, gun makers, and tobacco; diversify corporate boards; support Occupy Wall Street; force global warming onto the corporate agenda; create jobs; and challenge outlandish CEO pay. Webber argues that workers have found in labor’s capital a potent strategy against their exploiters. He explains the tactic’s surmountable difficulties even as he cautions that corporate interests are already working to deny labor’s access to this powerful and underused tool.

The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder is a rare good-news story for American workers, an opportunity hiding in plain sight. Combining legal rigor with inspiring narratives of labor victory, Webber shows how workers can wield their own capital to reclaim their strength.

Apocalyptic visions and prophecies from Zarathustra to yesterday form the luxuriant panorama in Eugen Weber's profound and elegant book. Beginning with the ancients of the West and the Orient and, especially, with those from whom we received our religions, the Jews and earliest Christians, Weber finds that an absolute belief in the end of time, when good would do final battle with evil, was omnipresent. Within centuries, apocalyptic beliefs inspired Crusades, scientific discoveries, works of art, voyages such as those of Columbus, rebellions and reforms. In the new world, American abolitionists, who were so critical to the movement to end slavery, believed in a final reckoning. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries' apocalyptic movements veered toward a lunatic fringe, and Weber rescues them from obloquy. From this more than two millennia history, he redresses the historical and religious amnesia that has consigned the study of apocalypses and millennial thought to the ash heap of thought and belief.

Weber, a master storyteller, turns detective in this latest book as he finds these alternative rationalities in the West, Asia, Africa, and South America. He writes with profound respect for the millennial pulse in history while never losing his urbane and witty style of writing. As we approach our second millennium beset by a host of apocalyptic predictions and cults, this book offers a map of understanding of the creeds we ignore at our peril.

The end of the nineteenth century in France was marked by political scandals, social unrest, dissension, and “decadence.” Yet the fin de siècle was also an era of great social and scientific progress, a time when advantages previously reserved for the privileged began to be shared by the many. Public transportation, electrical illumination, standard time, and an improved water supply radically altered the life of the modest folk, who found time for travel and leisure activities—including sports such as cycling. Change became the nature of things, and people believed that further improvement was not only possible but inevitable.

In this thoroughly engaging history, Eugen Weber describes ways of life, not as recorded by general history, but as contemporaries experienced them. He writes about political atmosphere and public prejudices rather than standard political history. Water and washing, bicycles and public transportation engage him more than great scientific discoveries. He discusses academic painting and poster art, the popular stage and music halls, at greater length than avant-garde and classic theater or opera. In this book the importance of telephones, plumbing, and central heating outranks such traditional subjects as international developments, the rise of organized labor, and the spread of socialism.

Weber does not neglect the darker side of the fin de siècle. The discrepancy between material advance and spiritual dejection, characteristic of our own times, interests him as much as the idea of progress, and he reminds us that for most people the period was far from elegant. In the lurid context of military defeat, political instability, public scandal, and clamorous social criticism, one had also to contend with civic dirt, unsanitary food, mob violence, and the seeds of modern-day scourges: pollution, drugs, sensationalism, debased art, the erosion of moral character. Yet millions of fin de siècle French lived as only thousands had lived fifty years before; while their advance was slow, their right to improvement was conceded.

“Lots of Romanians, in my day, dreamed of France; not many got there,” writes the author in his introduction. “Fortuitousness, contingency, and sheer good luck made me fall into France, just as one falls into love.” Fifty years after reaching France, by way of school in England, Eugen Weber presents a series of illuminations on the country he loves, and whose civilization he has made the center of his life's work as an interpreter of European history, subspecialty France.

My France focuses on some of the most intriguing aspects of French life: polities, myths, personalities, public problems, actions, conflicts. The topics Weber treats range from sports to religion, and include comments on folklore, peasant politicization, national socialism, the nature of the French right, antisemitism, and famous Frenchmen such as Pierre de Coubertin, Maurice Barres, and Marc Bloch. In every chapter he questions established assumptions, asks if things are quite as they are taken to be, and points out links between apparently unrelated doings (literature and private income, religion and superstition, fairy tales and everyday life). Every essay reflects his unique insight and is enlivened by his witty and graceful style, making My France irresistible not only to students of modern European history, but also to Francophiles and pundits of Europe everywhere.

Ever since it was made known to English-speaking readers by R. H. Tawney and Tolcott Parsons, the thought of Max Weber has attracted increasing attention among students of sociology, history, economics, jurisprudence, political science, and political philosophy. His far-flung ideas were systematically brought together in his last book, Economy and Society, the major part of which was not published until after his death in 1921. Of this most comprehensive and significant of all of Weber’s writings, only the Introductory Part has so far been available in English.

The present book contains an English translation of those parts of Economy and Society in which Weber investigates the relationship between the social phenomenon “law” and the other spheres of social life, especially the economic and the political. The translation, by Edward A. Shils and Max Rheinstein, is accompanied by an extensive introduction and explanatory and bibliographical notes by Max Rheinstein. The Introduction will acquaint the reader with the problems of sociology of law in general and with Weber’s approach and methods in particular. The notes are meant to help the reader understand Weber’s wide-ranging references to institutions of Western and Oriental systems of law of both past and present; they also contain references to the sources used by Weber and to later literature which will help the reader evaluate Weber’s statements and conclusions.

Max Weber’s main problem was to discover the causes of the rise of modern capitalism. In his discussions of the law he is primarily concerned with finding what features of Western law, if any, were favorable to the development of the capitalistic economy and in what ways this economy has reacted upon methods of legal thought. Is logical rationality, peculiar to certain parts of the Western world, connected with that rational method of economic thought which is characteristic of Western capitalism? His concern with methods of legal thought renders Weber’s ideas specially significant for present American and English jurisprudence.

Among the other problems he discusses are those of freedom of contract, its origins, its rise and its place among the institutions of capitalist and non-capitalist societies; the development of rational processes of law making; the connections between kinds of legal thought and the types of social functionaries by whom law is shaped in a given society; the social factors favoring or counteracting codification; and the economic and political significance of ideas of natural law.

The definitive new translation of Max Weber’s classic work of social theory—arguably the most important book by the foremost social theorist of the twentieth century.

Max Weber’s Economy and Society is the foundational text for the social sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, presenting a framework for understanding the relations among individual action, social action, economic action, and economic institutions. It also provides a classification of political forms based upon “systems of rule” and “rulership” that has shaped debate about the nature and role of charisma, tradition, legal authority, and bureaucracy.

Keith Tribe’s major new translation presents Economy and Society as it stood when Weber died in June 1920, with three complete chapters and a fragment of a fourth. One of the English-speaking world’s leading experts on Weber’s thought, Tribe has produced a uniquely clear and faithful translation that balances accuracy with readability. He adds to this a substantial introduction and commentary that reflect the new Weber scholarship of the past few decades.

This new edition will become the definitive translation of one of the few indisputably great intellectual works of the past 150 years.

“There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,” Walter Benjamin remarked, “and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by language.” In this book, Samuel Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing on a little-discussed stylistic trait in his formulation of concepts.

Weber’s focus is the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The “-ability” (-barkeit, in German) of concepts and literary forms traverses the whole of Benjamin’s oeuvre, from “impartibility” and “criticizability” through the well-known formulations of “citability,” “translatability,” and, most famously, the “reproducibility” of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Nouns formed with this suffix, Weber points out, refer to a possibility or potentiality, to a capacity rather than an existing reality. This insight allows for a consistent and enlightening reading of Benjamin’s writings.

Weber first situates Benjamin’s engagement with the “-ability” of various concepts in the context of his entire corpus and in relation to the philosophical tradition, from Kant to Derrida. Subsequent chapters deepen the implications of the use of this suffix in a wide variety of contexts, including Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, his relation to Carl Schmitt, and a reading of Wagner’s Ring. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.

At a time when globalization is taking a step backward, what’s the best way to organize a global enterprise? The key, explains political economist Steven Weber, is to prepare for a world increasingly made up of competing regions defined by their own rules and standards.

Globalization has taken a hit as trade wars and resistance to mass migrations dominate headlines. Are we returning to the old world of stand-alone nations? Political economist Steven Weber argues that we are heading toward something new. Global connectedness will not dissolve but will be defined by “regional” blocs, demarcated more by the rules and standards they follow than by territory. For leaders of firms and NGOs with global ambitions, navigating this transformation is the strategic challenge of the decade.

Not long ago, we thought the world was flattening out, offering a level playing field to organizations striving for worldwide reach. As global economic governance expanded, firms shifted operations to wherever was most efficient—designing in one country and buying, manufacturing, and selling in others. Today, the world looks bumpier, with rising protectionism, national struggles over data control, and tensions over who should set worldwide standards. Expect emerging regional blocs to be dominated by the major rule-makers: the US, China, and possibly the EU. Firms and NGOs will need to remake themselves by building complete, semi-independent organizations in each region. Every nation will choose which rule-maker it wants to align with, and it may not be the one next door. This new world has the potential to be more prosperous, Weber argues, but friction between the dynamics of geography and technology will make it more risky.

Pioneering research, creative thinking, and colorful storytelling from the frontlines of the global economy combine to make this a must-read for leaders and analysts facing tomorrow’s world.

Much of the innovative programming that powers the Internet, creates operating systems, and produces software is the result of “open source” code, that is, code that is freely distributed—as opposed to being kept secret—by those who write it. Leaving source code open has generated some of the most sophisticated developments in computer technology, including, most notably, Linux and Apache, which pose a significant challenge to Microsoft in the marketplace. As Steven Weber discusses, open source’s success in a highly competitive industry has subverted many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected.

Traditionally, intellectual property law has allowed companies to control knowledge and has guarded the rights of the innovator, at the expense of industry-wide cooperation. In turn, engineers of new software code are richly rewarded; but, as Weber shows, in spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can empower a more effective process for building intellectual products. In the case of Open Source, independent programmers—sometimes hundreds or thousands of them—make unpaid contributions to software that develops organically, through trial and error.

Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish exception to economic principles. The open source community is guided by standards, rules, decisionmaking procedures, and sanctioning mechanisms. Weber explains the political and economic dynamics of this mysterious but important market development.

Free-market capitalism, hegemony, Western culture, peace, and democracy—the ideas that shaped world politics in the twentieth century and underpinned American foreign policy—have lost a good deal of their strength. Authority is now more contested and power more diffuse. Hegemony (benign or otherwise) is no longer a choice, not for the United States, for China, or for anyone else.

Steven Weber and Bruce Jentleson are not declinists, but they argue that the United States must take a different stance toward the rest of the world in this, the twenty-first century. Now that we can’t dominate others, we must rely on strategy, making trade-offs and focusing our efforts. And they do not mean military strategy, such as “the global war on terror.” Rather, we must compete in the global marketplace of ideas—with state-directed capitalism, with charismatic authoritarian leaders, with jihadism. In politics, ideas and influence are now critical currency.

At the core of our efforts must be a new conception of the world order based on mutuality, and of a just society that inspires and embraces people around the world.

Winner of the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences

A world-renowned researcher of animal behavior reveals the extraordinary orienteering skills of desert ants, offering a thrilling account of the sophisticated ways insects function in their natural environments.

Cataglyphis desert ants are agile ultrarunners who can tolerate near-lethal temperatures when they forage in the hot midday sun. But it is their remarkable navigational abilities that make these ants so fascinating to study. Whether in the Sahara or its ecological equivalents in the Namib Desert and Australian Outback, the Cataglyphis navigators can set out foraging across vast expanses of desert terrain in search of prey, and then find the shortest way home. For almost half a century, Rüdiger Wehner and his collaborators have devised elegant experiments to unmask how they do it.

Through a lively and lucid narrative, Desert Navigator offers a firsthand look at the extraordinary navigational skills of these charismatic desert dwellers and the experiments that revealed how they strategize and solve complex problems. Wehner and his team discovered that these insect navigators use visual cues in the sky that humans are unable to see, the Earth’s magnetic field, wind direction, a step counter, and panoramic “snapshots” of landmarks, among other resources. The ants combine all of this information to steer an optimal course. At any given time during their long journey, they know exactly where to go. It is no wonder these nimble and versatile creatures have become models in the study of animal navigation.

Desert Navigator brings to light the marvelous capacity and complexity found in these remarkable insects and shows us how mini brains can solve mega tasks.

It is rare indeed for one book to be both a first-rate classroom text and a major contribution to scholarship. The Pathway for Oxygen is such a book, offering a new approach to respiratory physiology and morphology that quantitatively links the two. Professionalism in science has led to a compartmentalization of biology. Function is the domain of the physiologist, structure that of the morphologist, and they often operate with vastly disparate concepts and procedures. Yet the performance of the respiratory system depends both on structural and on functional properties that cannot be separated.

The first chapter of The Pathway for Oxygen engages the student with the design and function of the vertebrate respiratory organs from a comparative viewpoint. The second chapter adds to that foundation the link between cell energetics and oxygen needs of the whole animal. With Chapter 3 the excitement begins—new ideas, fresh attacks on old problems, and a fuller account of the power of the quantitative approach Dr. Ewald Weibel has pioneered.

The Pathway for Oxygen will be read eagerly by medical students, graduate students, advanced undergraduates in zoology—and by their professors.

This book addresses a simple question: Are animals designed economically? The pronghorn can run at speeds of up to 60 kilometers an hour and can maintain this speed for nearly a full hour. Clearly, the form of this elegant animal is beautifully matched to the function it needs to perform.

This is symmorphosis. The theory of symmorphosis predicts that the size of the parts in a system must be matched to the overall functional demand. Moreover, it predicts that animals must provide their complex systems with a functional capacity that can cope with the highest expected functional demands, possibly including some safety margin to prevent the system from failing when it is overloaded. In Symmorphosis, Ewald Weibel tests these predictions by working out the quantitative relations between form and function.

Physiologists will value this book because Weibel shows them that morphological information can be as quantitative as physiological data. Anatomists will value the book for its demonstration that advanced integrative physiology crucially depends on adequate but rigorously quantitative and testable information on structural design. Finally, anyone interested in the origins of the diverse forms of animals will be fascinated by Weibel's demonstrations that show how animals as different as shrews, pronghorns, dogs, goats--even humans--all develop from essentially the same blueprint by variation of design. This is a hidden beauty of the animal kingdom, which can be uncovered by a rigorous investigation of the quantitative relations of form and function.

A historian of science examines key public debates about the fundamental nature of humans to ask why a polarized discourse about nature versus nurture became so entrenched in the popular sciences of animal and human behavior.

Are humans innately aggressive or innately cooperative? In the 1960s, bestselling books enthralled American readers with the startling claim that humans possessed an instinct for violence inherited from primate ancestors. Critics responded that humans were inherently loving and altruistic. The resulting debate—fiercely contested and highly public—left a lasting impression on the popular science discourse surrounding what it means to be human.

Killer Instinct traces how Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and their followers drew on the sciences of animal behavior and paleoanthropology to argue that the aggression instinct drove human evolutionary progress. Their message, spread throughout popular media, brought pointed ripostes. Led by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, opponents presented a rival vision of human nature, equally based in biological evidence, that humans possessed inborn drives toward love and cooperation. Over the course of the debate, however, each side accused the other of holding an extremist position: that behavior was either determined entirely by genes or shaped solely by environment. Nadine Weidman shows that what started as a dispute over the innate tendencies of animals and humans transformed into an opposition between nature and nurture.

This polarized formulation proved powerful. When E. O. Wilson introduced his sociobiology in 1975, he tried to rise above the oppositional terms of the aggression debate. But the controversy over Wilson’s work—led by critics like the feminist biologist Ruth Hubbard—was ultimately absorbed back into the nature-versus-nurture formulation. Killer Instinct explores what happens and what gets lost when polemics dominate discussions of the science of human nature.

For much of the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, as David Weil’s groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another. The result has been declining wages, eroding benefits, inadequate health and safety conditions, and ever-widening income inequality.

“Authoritative…[The Fissured Workplace] shed[s] important new light on the resurgence of the power of finance and its connection to the debasement of work and income distribution.”
—Robert Kuttner, New York Review of Books

“The kinds of workplace fissuring discussed here—subcontracting, franchising, and global supply chains—have been the subjects of a number of studies detailing the employment effects that Weil describes. The Fissured Workplace is unusual in bringing this research together into an integrated, detailed, and decidedly policy-oriented analysis…It makes a convincing case that the better regulation of fissured workplaces is a first step towards reversing the erosion of pay and conditions at the bottom of the labor market.”
—Virginia Doellgast, Times Higher Education

The quest for roots has been an enduring American preoccupation. Over the centuries, generations have sketched coats of arms, embroidered family trees, established local genealogical societies, and carefully filled in the blanks in their bibles, all in pursuit of self-knowledge and status through kinship ties. This long and varied history of Americans’ search for identity illuminates the story of America itself, according to François Weil, as fixations with social standing, racial purity, and national belonging gave way in the twentieth century to an embrace of diverse ethnicity and heritage.

Seeking out one’s ancestors was a genteel pursuit in the colonial era, when an aristocratic pedigree secured a place in the British Atlantic empire. Genealogy developed into a middle-class diversion in the young republic. But over the next century, knowledge of one’s family background came to represent a quasi-scientific defense of elite “Anglo-Saxons” in a nation transformed by immigration and the emancipation of slaves. By the mid-twentieth century, when a new enthusiasm for cultural diversity took hold, the practice of tracing one’s family tree had become thoroughly democratized and commercialized.

Today, Ancestry.com attracts over two million members with census records and ship manifests, while popular television shows depict celebrities exploring archives and submitting to DNA testing to learn the stories of their forebears. Further advances in genetics promise new insights as Americans continue their restless pursuit of past and place in an ever-changing world.

“The extraordinary untold story of how a disillusioned American diplomat named William C. Bullitt came to Freud’s couch in 1926, and how Freud and his patient collaborated on a psychobiography of President Woodrow Wilson.”—Wall Street Journal

The notorious psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, rediscovered nearly a century after it was written by Sigmund Freud and US diplomat William C. Bullitt, sheds new light on how the mental health of a controversial American president shaped world events.

When the fate of millions rests on the decisions of a mentally compromised leader, what can one person do? Disillusioned by President Woodrow Wilson’s destructive and irrational handling of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, a US diplomat named William C. Bullitt asked this very question. With the help of his friend Sigmund Freud, Bullitt set out to write a psychological analysis of the president. He gathered material from personal archives and interviewed members of Wilson’s inner circle. In The Madman in the White House, Patrick Weil resurrects this forgotten portrait of a troubled president.

After two years of collaboration, Bullitt and Freud signed off on a manuscript in April 1932. But the book was not published until 1966, nearly thirty years after Freud’s death and only months before Bullitt’s. The published edition was heavily redacted, and by the time it was released, the mystique of psychoanalysis had waned in popular culture and Wilson’s legacy was unassailable. The psychological study was panned by critics, and Freud’s descendants denied his involvement in the project.

For nearly a century, the mysterious, original Bullitt and Freud manuscript remained hidden from the public. Then in 2014, while browsing the archives of Yale University, Weil happened upon the text. Based on his reading of the 1932 manuscript, Weil examines the significance of Bullitt and Freud’s findings and offers a major reassessment of the notorious psychobiography. The result is a powerful warning about the influence a single unbalanced personality can have on the course of history.

The inspiring letters of philosopher, mystic, and freedom fighter Simone Weil to her family, presented for the first time in English.

Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows, searching for her spiritual home while bearing witness to the violence that devastated Europe twice in her brief lifetime. The letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and ever-shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays.

The first complete collection of Weil’s missives to her family, A Life in Letters offers new insight into her personal relationships and experiences. The letters abound with vivid illustrations of a life marked by wisdom as much as seeking. The daughter of a bourgeois Parisian Jewish family, Weil was a troublemaking idealist who preferred the company of miners and Russian exiles to that of her peers. An extraordinary scholar of history and politics, she ultimately found a home in Christian mysticism. Weil paired teaching with poetry and even dabbled in mathematics, as evidenced by her correspondence with her brother, André, who won the Kyoto Prize in 1994 for the famed Weil Conjectures.

A Life in Letters depicts Simone Weil’s thought taking shape amid political turmoil, as she describes her participation in the Spanish struggle against fascism and in the transatlantic resistance to the Nazis. An introduction and notes by Robert Chenavier contextualize the letters historically and intellectually, relating Weil’s letters to her general body of writing. This book is an ideal entryway into Weil’s philosophical insights, one for both neophytes and acolytes to treasure.

During the past thirty years, the American workplace has undergone fundamental changes in the composition of its workforce, its technology, its financial structure, and its competitive position. These social and economic transformations have been paralleled by equally profound changes in the legal framework of the employment relationship. The National Labor Relations Act has proved incapable of protecting the long-established right of employees to union representation against growing resistance by employers. And to fill the gap created by the decline of unions, the legislatures and courts have been busy creating and enforcing many new individual employee rights.

Governing the Workplace addresses this new world of work. Its main concern is with the question of who will represent the interests of workers in major decisions about their lives: how and when they will be hired, fired, and retired, and how they will be treated when they are on the job. The book examines in vivid detail many real-life problems, ranging from wrongful dismissal and mandatory drug testing to pay equity and occupational safety, to employee involvement on the shop floor and in the corporate boardroom. Should workers be represented by a lawyer in the courtroom, by a government official in charge of an administrative program, by the employer’s personnel manager, by the union leader engaged in collective bargaining with the employer, or by the employees themselves participating in a committee that exercises real influence inside the firm? After undertaking a systematic appraisal of each of these options, leading labor lawyer Paul Weiler develops a blueprint for the reconstruction of the law of the workplace, especially designed to give American workers more effective representation.

The world of sports seems entwined with lawsuits. This is so, Paul Weiler explains, because of two characteristics intrinsic to all competitive sports. First, sporting contests lose their drama if the competition becomes too lopsided. Second, the winning athletes and teams usually take the "lion's share" of both fan attention and spending. So interest in second-rate teams and in second-rate leagues rapidly wanes, leaving one dominant league with monopoly power.

The ideal of evenly balanced sporting contests is continually challenged by economic, social, and technological forces. Consequently, Weiler argues, the law is essential to level the playing field for players, owners, and ultimately fans and taxpayers. For example, he shows why players' use of performance-enhancing drugs, even legal ones, should be treated as a more serious offense than, say, use of cocaine. He also explains why proposals to break up dominant leagues and create new ones will not work, and thus why both union representation of players and legal protection for fans--and taxpayers--are necessary.

Using well-known incidents--and supplying little-known facts--Weiler analyzes a wide array of moral and economic issues that arise in all competitive sports. He tells us, for example, how Commissioner Bud Selig should respond to Pete Rose's quest for admission to the Hall of Fame; what kind of settlement will allow baseball players and owners to avoid a replay of their past labor battles; and how our political leaders should address the recent wave of taxpayer-built stadiums.

Medical malpractice has been at the center of recurring tort crises for the last quarter-century. In 1960, expenditures on medical liability insurance in the United States amounted to about $60 million. In 1988, the figure topped $7 billion. Physicians have responded not simply with expensive methods of "defensive medicine" but also with successful pressure upon state legislatures to cut back on the tort rights of seriously injured patients. Various reforms have been proposed to deal with the successive crises, but so far none have proved to be effective and fair.

In this landmark book, Paul Weiler argues for a two-part approach to the medical malpractice crisis. First, he proposes a thorough revision of the current tort liability regime, which would concentrate available resources on meeting actual financial losses of seriously injured victims. It would also shift the focus of tort liability from the individual doctor to the hospital or other health care organization. This would elicit more effective quality assurance programs from the institutions that are in the best position to reduce our current unacceptable rate of physician-induced injuries.

But in states such as New York, Florida, and Illinois, where the current situation seems to have gone beyond the help of even drastic tort reform, the preferred solution is a no-fault system. Weiler shows how such a system would provide more equitable compensation, more effective prevention, and more economical administration than any practical alternative.

A Measure of Malpractice tells the story and presents the results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study, the largest and most comprehensive investigation ever undertaken of the performance of the medical malpractice system. The Harvard study was commissioned by the government of New York in 1986, in the midst of a malpractice crisis that had driven insurance premiums for surgeons and obstetricians in New York City to nearly $200,000 a year.

The Harvard-based team of doctors, lawyers, economists, and statisticians set out to investigate what was actually happening to patients in hospitals and to doctors in courtrooms, launching a far more informed debate about the future of medical liability in the 1990s. Careful analysis of the medical records of 30,000 patients hospitalized in 1984 showed that approximately one in twenty-five patients suffered a disabling medical injury, one quarter of these as a result of the negligence of a doctor or other provider. After assembling all the malpractice claims filed in New York State since 1975, the authors found that just one in eight patients who had been victims of negligence actually filed a malpractice claim, and more than two-thirds of these claims were filed by the wrong patients.

The study team then interviewed injured patients in the sample to discover the actual financial loss they had experienced: the key finding was that for roughly the same dollar amount now being spent on a tort system that compensates only a handful of victims, it would be possible to fund comprehensive disability insurance for all patients significantly disabled by a medical accident. The authors, who came to the project from very different perspectives about the present malpractice system, are now in agreement about the value of a new model of medical liability. Rather than merely tinker with the current system which fixes primary legal responsibility on individual doctors who can be proved medically negligent, legislatures should encourage health care organizations to take responsibility for the financial losses of all patients injured in their care.

Just as Henry David Thoreau “traveled a great deal in Concord,” Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg sees much of the world from the window of his study overlooking Lake Austin. In Lake Views Weinberg, considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive today, continues the wide-ranging reflections that have also earned him a reputation as, in the words of New York Times reporter James Glanz, “a powerful writer of prose that can illuminate—and sting.”

This collection presents Weinberg’s views on topics ranging from problems of cosmology to assorted world issues—military, political, and religious. Even as he moves beyond the bounds of science, each essay reflects his experience as a theoretical physicist. And as in the celebrated Facing Up, the essays express a viewpoint that is rationalist, reductionist, realist, and secular. A new introduction precedes each essay, explaining how it came to be written and bringing it up to date where necessary.

As an essayist, Weinberg insists on seeing things as they are, without despair and with good humor. Sure to provoke his readers—postmodern cultural critics, enthusiasts for manned space flight or missile defense, economic conservatives, sociologists of science, anti-Zionists, and religious zealots—this book nonetheless offers the pleasure of a sustained encounter with one of the most interesting scientific minds of our time.

“The phrase ‘public intellectual’ is much bandied about. Just a few real heavyweights in the world merit the title, and Steven Weinberg is preeminent among them.”
—Richard Dawkins

“Weinberg has a knack for capturing a complex concept in a succinct, unforgettable image… One of the smartest and most diligent scientists around.”
—Nature

In this wise and wide-ranging meditation, one of the most captivating science communicators of our time challenges us to reconsider the entanglement of science and society. From the cosmological to the personal, from astronomy and quantum physics to the folly of manned spaceflight and the rewards of getting things wrong, Steven Weinberg shares his views on the workings of the universe and our aspirations and limitations. Third Thoughts aims to provoke and inform and never loses sight of the human dimension of scientific discovery.

“One of the 20th century’s greatest physicists…shares his strongly-held opinions on everything from the Higgs boson to the state of theoretical physics and the problems of science and society.”
—Forbes

“This book should be read not only for its insightful and illuminating explanations of a wide range of physical phenomena but also for the opportunity it affords to follow the wanderings of a brilliant mind through topics ranging from high-energy physics and the makeup of the cosmos to poetry, and from the history and philosophy of science to the dangers of economic inequality… [A] captivating book.”
—Mario Livio, Science

“Human beings are a part of nature and apart from it.” The argument of Natural Law and Justice is that the philosophy of natural law and contemporary theories about the nature of justice are both efforts to make sense of the fundamental paradox of human experience: individual freedom and responsibility in a causally determined universe.

Lloyd Weinreb restores the original understanding of natural law as a philosophy about the place of humankind in nature. He traces the natural law tradition from its origins in Greek speculation through its classic Christian statement by Thomas Aquinas. He goes on to show how the social contract theorists adapted the idea of natural law to provide for political obligation in civil society and how the idea was transformed in Kant’s account of human freedom. He brings the historical narrative down to the present with a discussion of the contemporary debate between natural law and legal positivism, including particularly the natural law theories of Finnis, Richards, and Dworkin.

Weinreb then adopts the approach of modern political philosophy to develop the idea of justice as a union of the distinct ideas of desert and entitlement. He shows liberty and equality to be the political analogues of desert and entitlement and both pairs to be the normative equivalents of freedom and cause. In this part of the book, Weinreb considers the theories of justice of Rawls and Nozick as well as the communitarian theory of Maclntyre and Sandel.

The conclusion brings the debates about natural law and justice together, as parallel efforts to understand the human condition. This original contribution to legal philosophy will be especially appreciated by scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of political philosophy, legal philosophy, and the law generally.

We speak of rights as though they are objective matters of fact that have a crucial bearing on how we ought to behave. Yet few, if any, rights are universally acknowledged without wide differences of meaning. Instead, they usually represent the particular ideals of the individuals or groups that claim them. Theories of rights have always grappled with this central problem, but none of the literature on the subject has offered a satisfactory solution. Lloyd Weinreb makes the first significant advance toward an understanding of what rights are, how they function in our lives, and why we need them.

Weinreb’s central argument is that rights are tightly connected to responsibility. They are the normative constituents of persons, attributes that we have rightly, as our due. As such, they enable us to overcome the antinomy of moral freedom and natural causal order. Without them, we could not regard human beings as persons, that is, as free and responsible, or autonomous. Since responsibility is a structural feature of our experience and a matter of fact, rights too are matters of fact.

Against a review of the current debates on the subject, Weinreb fully elaborates his original argument on the nature of rights and finds the source of concrete rights in the nomos, or deep conventions, of a community. Applying his theory, he shows how it helps to answer specific questions about animal rights, human rights—including, in the context of abortion and capital punishment, the right to life—and civil rights, including particularly rights of the handicapped, gay rights, and affirmative action in contemporary American society. Along the way, Weinreb shows that Oedipus and Roger Clemens have more in common than either would probably have supposed.

This highly original work will significantly redirect the study of rights. It will be especially valuable to those who practice or study law, philosophy, politics, and public policy.

Private law is a familiar and pervasive phenomenon. It applies our deepest intuitions about personal responsibility and justice to the property we own and use, to the injuries we inflict or avoid, and to the contracts which we make or break. The Idea of Private Law offers a new way of understanding this phenomenon. Rejecting the functionalism popular among legal scholars, Ernest Weinrib advances the provocative idea that private law is an autonomous and noninstrumental moral practice, with its own structure and rationality. Weinrib draws on Kant and Aristotle to set out a formalist approach to private law that repudiates the identification of law with politics or economics. Weinrib argues that private law is to be understood not as a mechanism for promoting efficiency but as a juridical enterprise in which coherent public reason elaborates the norms implicit in the parties' interaction. The book combines philosophical exposition and legal analysis, and pays special attention to issues of tort law.

Private law, Weinrib tells us, embodies a special morality that links the doer and the sufferer of harm. Weinrib elucidates the standpoint internal to this morality, in opposition to functionalists, who view private law as an instrument in the service of external and independently justifiable goals. After establishing the inadequacy of functionalist approaches, Weinrib traces the implications of the formalism he proposes for our ideas of the structure, coherence, and normative grounding of private law. Furthermore, the author shows how this formalism manifests itself in the leading doctrines of private law liability. Finally, he describes the public but nonpolitical role of the courts in articulating the special morality of private law.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, business leaders condemned civil liberties as masks for subversive activity, while labor sympathizers denounced the courts as shills for industrial interests. But by the Second World War, prominent figures in both camps celebrated the judiciary for protecting freedom of speech. In this strikingly original history, Laura Weinrib illustrates how a surprising coalition of lawyers and activists made judicial enforcement of the Bill of Rights a defining feature of American democracy.

The Taming of Free Speech traces our understanding of civil liberties to conflict between 1910 and 1940 over workers’ right to strike. As self-proclaimed partisans in the class war, the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union promoted a bold vision of free speech that encompassed unrestricted picketing and boycotts. Over time, however, they subdued their rhetoric to attract adherents and prevail in court. At the height of the New Deal, many liberals opposed the ACLU’s litigation strategy, fearing it would legitimize a judiciary they deemed too friendly to corporations and too hostile to the administrative state. Conversely, conservatives eager to insulate industry from government regulation pivoted to embrace civil liberties, despite their radical roots. The resulting transformation in constitutional jurisprudence—often understood as a triumph for the Left—was in fact a calculated bargain.

America’s civil liberties compromise saved the courts from New Deal attack and secured free speech for labor radicals and businesses alike. Ever since, competing groups have clashed in the arena of ideas, shielded by the First Amendment.

High blood pressure is one of our most severe public health problems, and any national health policy must take account of the dilemmas posed by hypertension. This disease is widespread in the United States, affecting between 10 and 30 percent of the adult population. Of the 24 million Americans so afflicted, only about three million are thought to be adequately treated; yet treatment of all hypertensives would cost perhaps five billion dollars a year.

In their ground-breaking study, Weinstein and Stason apply the tools of cost-benefit analysis to examine the policy implications of existing approaches to hypertension. Their conclusions have important consequences for allocating the resources available to combat the disease, and they identify the salient questions to be answered by new research. The authors' recommendations would lead to significant changes in current approaches (the much-publicized effort to screen for new cases, for instance). They suggest that criteria for case-finding and treatment be radically altered to take account of differences in the complications of high blood pressure as a function of age, sex, and race. They stress patient compliance as the single most important factor in reducing deaths—considerably more important right now than screening. Their research priorities include: determining the extent to which early or mild hypertension affects the rate of complication; pinning down the role that side-effects of medication play in the demonstrably poor adherence of patients to treatment; and developing alternative programs to improve patient adherence.

“She has a funny way of looking at you,” a fourth-grader told Rhona Weinstein about his teacher. “She gets that look and says ‘I am very disappointed in you.’ I hate it when she does that. It makes me feel like I’m stupid. Just crazy, stupid, dumb.” Even young children know what adults think of them. All too often, they live down to expectations, as well as up to them. This book is about the context in which expectations play themselves out.

Drawing upon a generation of research on self-fulfilling prophecies in education, including the author’s own extensive fieldwork in schools, Reaching Higher argues that our expectations of children are often too low. With compelling case studies, Weinstein shows that children typed early as “not very smart” can go on to accomplish far more than is expected of them by an educational system with too narrow a definition of ability and the way abilities should be nurtured. Weinstein faults the system, pointing out that teachers themselves are harnessed by policies that do not enable them to reach higher for all children.

Her analysis takes us beyond current reforms that focus on accountability for test results. With rich descriptions of effective classrooms and schools, Weinstein makes a case for a changed system that will make the most of every child and enable students and teachers to engage more meaningfully in learning.

A range of genres, rooted in local impulses, reaching global audiences; a main prop of commercial culture and an art form open to aspirants and fans from every background: About the vast and diverse topic of pop, scholars and critics, journalists and musicians have much to say, but rarely to each other. A crossover venture begun at Seattle's Experience Music Project, this book captures the academic and the critical, the musical and the literary in an impromptu dialogue that suggests the breadth and vitality of pop inquiry today.

This Is Pop illustrates what can happen when the best of scholarship, criticism, and pop's inherent unruliness intersect. Robert Christgau and Gary Giddins, pivotal critics, encounter Simon Frith and Robert Walser, pioneers in the study of popular music. Luc Sante and Geoffrey O'Brien write about sound with the same prose elegance they apply to noir or New York streetlife. Musicians Carrie Brownstein and Sarah Dougher, both active in the riot grrl and rock scenes of the Pacific Northwest, examine how audience responses affect their craft. John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats and the idiosyncratic zine Last Plane to Jakarta, attends to the web postings of hair metal fans. From film tracks to Merle Travis, from Ray Davies to rock infighting, from indie poetry to the Carly Simon Principle of pop sincerity, this book reflects the welter of ambition, style, and meaning that draw us to pop in the first place. The result is a collection as cluttered with treasures as a good music store.

Nonprofit organizations are all around us. Many people send their children to nonprofit day-care centers, schools, and colleges, and their elderly parents to nonprofit nursing homes; when they are ill, they may well go to a nonprofit hospital; they may visit a nonprofit museum, read the magazine of the nonprofit National Geographic Society, donate money to a nonprofit arts organization, watch the nonprofit public television station, exercise at the nonprofit YMCA. Nonprofits surround us, but we rarely think about their role in the economy, or the possibility of their competing unfairly with private enterprise.

Burton Weisbrod asks the important questions: What is the rationale for public subsidy of nonprofit organizations? In which sectors of the economy are they of real importance? Why do people contribute money and time to them and why should donations be tax deductible? What motivates managers of nonprofits? Why are these organizations exempt from taxes on income, property, and sales? When the search for revenue brings nonprofits into competition with proprietary firms—as when colleges sell computers or museum gift shops sell books and jewelry—is that desirable?

Weisbrod examines the raison d’être for nonprofits. The evidence he assembles shows that nonprofits are particularly useful in situations where consumers have little information on what they are purchasing and must therefore rely on the probity of the seller.

Written in a clear, direct style without technicalities, The Nonprofit Economy is addressed to a broad audience, dealing comprehensively with what nonprofits do, how well they do it, how they are financed, and how they interact with private enterprises and government. At the same time, the book presents important new evidence on the size and composition of the nonprofit part of the economy, the relationship between financial sources and outputs, and the different roles of nonprofits and for-profit organizations in the same industries. The Nonprofit Economy will become a basic source for anyone with a serious interest in nonprofit organizations.

The middle class black women who people Judith Weisenfeld’s history were committed both to social action and to institutional expression of their religious convictions. Their story provides an illuminating perspective on the varied forces working to improve quality of life for African Americans in crucial times.

When undertaking to help young women migrating to and living alone in New York, Weisenfeld’s protagonists chose to work within a national evangelical institution. Their organization of a black chapter of the Young Women’s Christian Association in 1905 was a clear step toward establishing a suitable environment for young working women; it was also an expression of their philosophy of social uplift. And predictably it was the beginning of an equal rights struggle—to work as equals with white women activists. Growing and adapting as New York’s black community evolved over the decades, the black YWCA assumed a central role both in the community’s religious life and as a training ground for social action. Weisenfeld’s analysis of the setbacks and successes closes with the National YWCA’s vote in 1946 to adopt an interracial charter and move toward integration of local chapters, thus opening the door to a different set of challenges for a new generation of black activists.

Weisenfeld’s account gives a vibrant picture of African American women as significant actors in the life of the city. And it bears telling witness to the religious, class, gender, and racial negotiations so often involved in American social reform movements.

Even after 150 years, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is irresistibly compelling. But how can this idea—in which competition prevails—be consistent with all that we know about the thoroughly cooperative nature of life at the genetic and cellular level? This book reconciles these discrepancies.

Assembling a set of general principles, authors Kenneth Weiss and Anne Buchanan build a comprehensive, unified theory that applies on the evolutionary time scale but also on the developmental and ecological scales where daily life is lived, and cells, organisms, and species interact. They present this story through a diversity of examples spanning the fundamental challenges that organisms have faced throughout the history of life. This shows that even very complex traits can be constructed simply, based on these principles. Although relentless competitive natural selection is widely assumed to be the primary mover of evolutionary change, The Mermaid’s Tale shows how life more generally works on the basis of cooperation. The book reveals that the focus on competition and cooperation is largely an artifact of the compression of time—a distortion that dissolves when the nature and origins of adapted life are viewed primarily from developmental and evolutionary time scales.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that sectarianism is intrinsically linked to violence, bloodshed, or social disharmony, Max Weiss uncovers the complex roots of Shiʿi sectarianism in twentieth-century Lebanon.

The template for conflicted relations between the Lebanese state and Shiʿi society arose under French Mandate rule through a process of gradual transformation, long before the political mobilization of the Shiʿi community under the charismatic Imam Musa al-Sadr and his Movement of the Deprived, and decades before the radicalization linked to Hizballah. Throughout the period, the Shiʿi community was buffeted by crosscutting political, religious, and ideological currents: transnational affiliations versus local concerns; the competing pull of Arab nationalism and Lebanese nationalism; loyalty to Jabal ʿAmil, the cultural heartland of Shiʿi Lebanon; and the modernization of religious and juridical traditions.

Uncoupling the beginnings of modern Shiʿi collective identity from the rise of political Shiʿism, Weiss transforms our understanding of the nature of sectarianism and shows why in Lebanon it has been both so productive and so destructive at the same time.

Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine introduces readers to the panoply of public entertainment that flourished in Palestine from the first century BCE to the sixth century CE. Drawing on a trove of original archaeological and textual evidence, Zeev Weiss reconstructs an ancient world where Romans, Jews, and Christians intermixed amid a heady brew of shouts, roars, and applause to watch a variety of typically pagan spectacles.

Ancient Roman society reveled in many such spectacles—dramatic performances, chariot races, athletic competitions, and gladiatorial combats—that required elaborate public venues, often maintained at great expense. Wishing to ingratiate himself with Rome, Herod the Great built theaters, amphitheaters, and hippodromes to bring these forms of entertainment to Palestine. Weiss explores how the indigenous Jewish and Christian populations responded, as both spectators and performers, to these cultural imports. Perhaps predictably, the reactions of rabbinic and clerical elites did not differ greatly. But their dire warnings to shun pagan entertainment did little to dampen the popularity of these events.

Herod’s ambitious building projects left a lasting imprint on the region. His dream of transforming Palestine into a Roman enclave succeeded far beyond his rule, with games and spectacles continuing into the fifth century CE. By then, however, public entertainment in Palestine had become a cultural institution in decline, ultimately disappearing during Justinian’s reign in the sixth century.

This compact and original exposition of optimal control theory and applications is designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in economics. It presents a new elementary yet rigorous proof of the maximum principle and a new way of applying the principle that will enable students to solve any one-dimensional problem routinely. Its unified framework illuminates many famous economic examples and models.

This work also emphasizes the connection between optimal control theory and the classical themes of capital theory. It offers a fresh approach to fundamental questions such as: What is income? How should it be measured? What is its relation to wealth?

The book will be valuable to students who want to formulate and solve dynamic allocation problems. It will also be of interest to any economist who wants to understand results of the latest research on the relationship between comprehensive income accounting and wealth or welfare.