A tourist visiting the famous cathedral at Chartres might be surprised to discover an enormous labyrinth embedded in the thirteenth-century floor. Why is it there? In this fascinating book Craig Wright explores the complex symbolism of the labyrinth in architecture, religious thought, music, and dance from the Middle Ages to the present.

The mazes incorporated into church floors and illustrating religious books were symbolic of an epic journey through this sinful world to salvation. A savior figure typically led the way along this harrowing spiritual path. Wright looks at other meanings of the maze as well, from religious dancing on church labyrinths to pagan maze rituals outside the church. He demonstrates that the theme inherent in spiritual mazes is also present in medieval song, in the Armed Man Masses of the Renaissance, and in compositions of the Enlightenment, including the works of J. S. Bach. But the thread that binds the maze to the church, to music, and to dance also ties it to the therapeutic labyrinth that proliferates today. For as this richly interdisciplinary history reveals, the maze of the "new age" spiritualists also traces its lineage to the ancient myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. While the hero of the maze may change from one culture to the next, the symbol endures.

This volume, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Wittgenstein's death, brings together thirteen of Crispin Wright's most influential essays on Wittgenstein's later philosophies of language and mind, many hard to obtain, including the first publication of his Whitehead Lectures given at Harvard in 1996.

Organized into four groups, the essays focus on issues about following a rule and the objectivity of meaning; on Saul Kripke's contribution to the interpretation of Wittgenstein; on privacy and self-knowledge; and on aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics. Wright uses the cutting edge of Wittgenstein's thought to expose and undermine the common assumptions in platonistic views of mathematical and logical objectivity and Cartesian ideas about self-knowledge. The great question remains: How to react to the demise of these assumptions? In response, the essays develop a concerted, evolving approach to the possibilities--and limitations--of constructive philosophies of mathematics and mind. Their collection constitutes a major statement by one of Britain's most important philosophers--and will provide an indispensable tool both for students of Wittgenstein and for scholars working more generally in the metaphysics of mind and language.

Crispin Wright's Truth and Objectivity brought about a far-reaching reorientation of the metaphysical debates concerning realism and truth. The essays in this companion volume prefigure, elaborate, or defend the proposals put forward in that landmark work.

The collection includes the Gareth Evans memorial lecture in which the program of Truth and Objectivity was first announced, as well as all of Wright's published reactions to the extensive commentary his study provoked; it presents substantial new developments and applications of the pluralistic outlook on the realism debates proposed in Truth and Objectivity, and further pursues its distinctive minimalist conceptions of truth and of truth-aptitude. Among the papers are important discussions of coherence conceptions of truth, of Hilary Putnam's most recent views on truth, and of the classical debate between correspondence, coherence, pragmatism, and deflationary conceptions of the notion. Others are concerned with Kripke's famous argument against physicalist conceptions of sensation; the distinction between minimal truth-aptitude and cognitive command; a novel prospectus for a philosophy of vagueness; and a new proposal about the most resilient interpretation of relativism.

Crispin Wright offers an original perspective on the place of “realism” in philosophical inquiry. He proposes a radically new framework for discussing the claims of the realists and the anti-realists. This framework rejects the classical “deflationary” conception of truth yet allows both disputants to respect the intuition that judgments, whose status they contest, are at least semantically fitted for truth and may often justifiably be regarded as true. In the course of his argument, Wright offers original critical discussions of many central concerns of philosophers interested in realism, including the “deflationary” conception of truth, internal realist truth, scientific realism and the theoreticity of observation, and the role of moral states of affairs in explanations of moral beliefs.

The defeat of the Ottomans by the Holy League fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) was among the most celebrated international events of the sixteenth century. This volume anthologizes the work of twenty-two poets from diverse social and geographical backgrounds who composed Latin poetry, often modeled on Vergil and other Roman poets, in response to the news of the battle, the largest Mediterranean naval encounter since antiquity. Among the poems included is the two-book Austrias Carmen by the remarkable Juan Latino, a black African former slave who became a professor of Latin in Granada. The poems, including two previously unpublished, are here translated into English for the first time, along with fresh editions of the Latin texts.

Ever the chronicler and teacher, Franklin wrote an autobiography, ostensibly for his illegitimate son William. Apart from hurried additions when he was in his eighties, his story halts at 1757. Tracing his footsteps centuries later, Franklin’s most celebrated biographer completes the last twenty-five years of the autobiography by drawing on Franklin’s most personal and insightful letters and writings—even making additions within the interrupted Autobiography to give us the expository memoir that Franklin intended. Indeed, as he wrote it.

The most original and most delightful of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin was publisher and printer, essayist and author, businessman and “general,” scientist and philologist, politician and diplomat, moralist and sage—and a thoroughly rational patriot who was a major force in winning his country’s independence and securing its life in the Constitution. Born poor in Cotton Mather’s Boston, he was soon at ease in Quaker Philadelphia, and later in royal London, and in elegant Paris. Born with no advantages, he died wealthy and esteemed. He was the quintessential American, almost totally free of the limits of his environment, ready to accept any challenge, to speculate, experiment, and question.

Esmond Wright, the distinguished English scholar of America, sees Franklin as an Old England Man and a reluctant revolutionary; civilized, urbane, devious, and on occasion just a little unscrupulous. For, despite his charm and genius, Franklin was not admired by everybody. His contemporary John Adams thought little of his political abilities, and the Federalist pamphleteer William Cobbett called him a “crafty and lecherous old hypocrite.” In the next century, Mark Twain, Hawthorne, and Melville did not value him; still later, D. H. Lawrence despised the middle-class morality he promoted. Many today deplore his lack of interest in the arts or metaphysics, his lack of passionate commitment, his opportunism, his occasional coarseness. Yet his success in business, his many-faceted public career, his ingenious inventions and world-renowned scientific genius, his splendid prose style, his worldly wisdom, and the attractive personality that shines through his remarks and writings, made Benjamin Franklin the “new man” of the eighteenth-century dream and also vastly appealing to the modern temper. Wright’s new biography presents a fully rounded portrait of this remarkable man for all ages.

This first comprehensive biography of Franklin in fifty years has taken advantage of Yale’s massive edition-in-progress of Franklin’s papers and of the many specialized studies inspired by the correspondence. Franklin of Philadelphia, designed for the general reader, is also a work for scholars, for the author appends a thorough analysis of other interpretations of Franklin’s career and personality.

Winner of the Alice Hanson Jones Prize, Economic History Association
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

The civil rights movement was also a struggle for economic justice, one that until now has not had its own history. Sharing the Prize demonstrates the significant material gains black southerners made—in improved job opportunities, quality of education, and health care—from the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. Because black advances did not come at the expense of southern whites, Gavin Wright argues, the civil rights struggle was that rarest of social revolutions: one that benefits both sides.

“Wright argues that government action spurred by the civil-rights movement corrected a misfiring market, generating large economic gains that private companies had been unable to seize on their own.”
—The Economist

“Written…with the care and imagination [Wright] displayed in his superb work on slavery and the southern economy since the Civil War, this excellent economic history offers the best empirical account to date of the effects the civil rights revolution had on southern labor markets, schools, and other important institutions…With much of the nation persuaded that a post-racial age has begun, Wright’s analytical history…takes on fresh urgency.”
—Ira Katznelson, New York Review of Books

Harrison Wright discusses aspects of the history of northern New Zealand with particular emphasis on the interaction between the Maori and Western societies. The explorers, traders, whalers, missionaries, and other Westerners who visited New Zealand are considered as the agents of change, and the Maoris are considered as they and their environment altered the expectations and activities of the Westerners who came to live among them.

The author first describes the nature and extent of the Western penetration into New Zealand; he then examines the depopulation noticeable after the Western penetration and its causes—the spread of contagious diseases and the introduction of Western war methods. In the third part of the book he studies the effects of Western society—particularly of the Christian missionary work and of the influence of the traders and whalers—on the Maori patterns of behavior.

In conclusion, Wright contrasts the happy situation at the time of the British annexation in 1840, when there was a high conversion rate and encouraging agricultural progress, with the years immediately following, when the Maoris began resentfully to sense that the missionaries were not able to fill for them the gaps left by a growing sophistication and the consequent rejection of old tribal and religious habits. For their part, the Europeans realized that they had underestimated the durability of Maori habits of thought and had been overoptimistic about changing the ways of a people with regard only for their own—European—goals.

At the end of the twentieth century, many fear that the bonds holding civil society together have come undone. Yet, as the noted scholar Dennis Wrong shows us, our generation is not alone in fearing a breakdown of social ties and a descent into violent conflict. Modern masters such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Freud, Mead, Parsons, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber tried to understand what in human nature provokes social cooperation and solidarity and what arouses conflict and chaos.

To minimize discord and promote civility, society must grasp the psychological and sociological elements of human nature involved in attaining that end. The author affords an illuminating perspective on our own efforts to create a well-functioning system that allows for productive and meaningful lives and remains open to change and growth. This important book reveals the individual and social processes that offer potential for reconciliation in the present and the future.

Traditionally the "Chinese body" was approached as a totality and explained by sweeping comparisons of the differences that distinguished Chinese examples from their Western counterparts. Recently, scholars have argued that we must look at particular examples of Chinese images of the body and explore their intrinsic conceptual complexity and historical specificity.

The twelve contributors to this volume adopt a middle position. They agree that Chinese images are conditioned by indigenous traditions and dynamics of social interaction, but they seek to explain a general Chinese body and face by charting multiple, specific bodies and faces. All of the chapters are historical case studies and investigate particular images, such as Han dynasty tomb figurines; Buddhist texts and illustrations; pictures of deprivation, illness, deformity, and ghosts; clothing; formal portraiture; and modern photographs and films. From the diversity of art forms and historical periods studied, there emerges a more complex picture of ways that the visual culture of the body and face in China has served to depict the living, memorialize the dead, and present the unrepresentable in art.

Taiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People's Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China?

In award-winning Rival Partners, Wu Jieh-min follows the development of Taiwanese enterprises in China over twenty-five years and provides fresh insights. The geopolitical shift in Asia beginning in the 1970s and the global restructuring of value chains since the 1980s created strong incentives for Taiwanese entrepreneurs to rush into China despite high political risks and insecure property rights. Taiwanese investment, in conjunction with Hong Kong capital, laid the foundation for the world’s factory to flourish in the southern province of Guangdong, but official Chinese narratives play down Taiwan’s vital contribution. It is hard to imagine the Guangdong model without Taiwanese investment, and, without the Guangdong model, China’s rise could not have occurred. Going beyond the received wisdom of the “China miracle” and “Taiwan factor,” Wu delineates how Taiwanese businesspeople, with the cooperation of local officials, ushered global capitalism into China. By partnering with its political archrival, Taiwan has benefited enormously, while helping to cultivate an economic superpower that increasingly exerts its influence around the world.

After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the rise of a vernacular language movement, most scholars and writers declared the classical Chinese poetic tradition to be dead. But how could a longstanding high poetic form simply grind to a halt, even in the face of tumultuous social change? In this groundbreaking book, Shengqing Wu explores the transformation of Chinese classical-style poetry in the early twentieth century. Drawing on extensive archival research into the poetry collections and literary journals of two generations of poets and critics, Wu discusses the continuing significance of the classical form with its densely allusive and intricately wrought style. She combines close readings of poems with a depiction of the cultural practices their authors participated in, including poetry gatherings, the use of mass media, international travel, and translation, to show how the lyrical tradition was a dynamic force fully capable of engaging with modernity. By examining the works and activities of previously neglected poets who maintained their commitment to traditional aesthetic ideals, Modern Archaics illuminates the splendor of Chinese lyricism and highlights the mutually transformative power of the modern and the archaic.

With admirable lucidity and scrupulous attention to detail, Silas Wu recreates the conflict and intrigue that marked the struggle for succession to the throne of China during the reign of Emperor K’ang-hsi. This crisis, as Wu portrays it, stemmed from irreconcilable familial commitments and imperial responsibilities. K’ang-hsi, frequently compared to his contemporaries Louis XIV and Peter the Great, is depicted here as a psychologically complex individual with bewildering inconsistencies in his behavior. His fears and doubts persistently confounded his ministers, impeding the effectiveness of his rule. Yin-jeng, his talented and promising son, had been hand-picked to succeed from infancy, but steadily degenerated into cruelty, immorality, and madness, becoming totally unfit to be the heir to the throne of the Chinese empire.

The story is told against the complex background of the K’ang-hsi era with specific delineations of the chief personalities concerned. This multifaceted approach enables Wu to link political events of the time to the conflicting desires and passions of father and son. His careful investigation of the cultural concept of filial piety and its profound influence on K’ang-hsi enables him to unravel the latter’s paradoxical behavior, both private and public. Even the subtle effects of contemporary social changes on the court at Peking come to light through Wu’s comprehensive analysis.

Wu has utilized nearly every document available on the subject including letters, diaries, intelligence reports, and K’ang-hsi’s secret correspondence with court officials. The result is an unusual book that unites history and psychology.

In 1969, House and Garden magazine commissioned one of the first minimalist artists, Patricia Johanson, to propose new directions for American garden art. Having never been exhibited or published before as a whole, the resulting garden proposals reveal an unknown dimension of the New York art world of the late 1960s. Three years of research have brought 146 surviving drawings to light. They demonstrate the intimate progress of the artist’s engagement with nature in her quest for an art concerned with ethical relationships between humans and the natural world. Shuttling between the West and the East, and the contemporary and the historical, Johanson takes equal distances from earthworks created by her peer artists such as Robert Smithson, and the environmentalism advocated by landscape architects following Ian McHarg. Her vision of a new modernity is still significant today. The book is divided into 2 volumes, and includes a preface by Stephen Bann and a catalogue of 146 original garden proposals.

Drawing from literary, historical, dramatic, and anecdotal sources, Yenna Wu conducts a rich exploration of an unusually prominent theme in premodern Chinese prose fiction and drama: that of jealous and belligerent wives, or viragos, who dominate their husbands and abuse other women. Focusing on Chinese literary works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, she presents many colorful perspectives on this type of aggression, reviewing early literary and historical examples of the phenomenon.

Wu argues that although the various portraits of the virago often reveal the writers' insecurities about strong-willed women in general, the authors also satirize the kind of man whose behavioral patterns have been catalysts for female aggression. She shows that various elements of these portraits constitute a subversive form of parody that casts a revealing light on the patriarchal hierarchy of premodern China.

Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to "wreak havoc under the heaven" when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government's grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed.

The Cultural Revolution began as a "revolution from above," and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution's more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China's state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy.

The mass demobilizations of 1968-69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later.

Taiwan is a classic case of export-led industrialization. But unlike South Korea and Japan, where large firms have been the major exporters, before the late 1980s Taiwan's successful exporters were overwhelmingly small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The SMEs became the engine of the entire economy, yet for many years the state virtually ignored the SMEs and their role as exporters.

What factors account for the success of the SMEs and their benign neglect by the state? The key was a strict division of labor: state and large private enterprises jointly monopolized the domestic market. This gave the SMEs a free run in export markets. How did this industrial structure come into being? The author argues that it was an unintended consequence of the state's policy toward the private sector and its political strategies for managing societal forces. Indeed, Taiwan's unique industrial structure was shaped by both the witting and the unwitting interactions of the state and the private sector. Moreover, as the author shows, this industrial policy was a product of the internal politics of the economic bureaucracy, and the formulation and implementation of economic policy hinged on mechanisms for solving differences within the state.

Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) was a powerful clergyman and the most influential political thinker of pre-Conquest England. An advocate for the rights and privileges of the Church, he authored the laws of King Aethelred and King Cnut in prose that combined the rhetorical flourishes of a master homilist with the language of law. Some works forged a distinctive style by adding rhythm and alliteration drawn from Old English poetry. In the midst of Viking invasions and cultural upheaval, Wulfstan articulated a complementary relationship between secular and ecclesiastical law that shaped the political world of eleventh-century England. He also pushed the clergy to return to the ideals of their profession. Old English Legal Writings is the first publication to bring together Wulfstan’s works on law, church governance, and political reform. When read together, they reveal the scope and originality of his thought as it lays out the mutual obligations of the church, the state, and the common people. This volume presents new editions of the Old English texts alongside new English translations.

Renowned German social historian Heide Wunder refers to the cosmic image contained in the 1578 Book of Marital Discipline that characterizes the relationship between husband and wife. Today, "He is the sun, she is the moon" might be interpreted as a hierarchy of dominance and subordination. At the time it was used, however, sun and moon reflected the different but equal status of husband and wife.

Wunder shows how the history of women and the history of gender relations can provide crucial insights into how societies organize themselves and provide resources for political action. She observes actual circumstances as well as the normative rules that were supposed to guide women's lives. We learn what skills were necessary to take charge of households, what people ate, how they furnished their homes, what birth control measures were available, what role women played in peasant protest. Wunder finds that, in addition to the history of losses and setbacks for women observed by so many current interpreters, there is a history of gains as well. The regency of noble women was normal, as was the shared responsibility of wife and husband in a peasant household, an artisan's workshop, or a merchant's business.

Using sources as diverse as memoirs, wedding and funeral sermons, novels, and chronicles, and including a wealth of demographic information, Wunder reveals a surprising new image of early modern women and provides a richer interpretation of early modern Europe.

Sociologist Robert Wuthnow notes remarkable similarities in the social conditions surrounding three of the greatest challenges to the status quo in the development of modern society—the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of Marxist socialism.

It has become common to lament Americans' tendency to pursue individual interests apart from any institutional association. But to those who charge that Americans are at home watching television rather than getting involved in their communities, Robert Wuthnow answers that while certain kinds of civic engagement may be declining, innovative new forms are taking their place.

Acknowledging that there has been a significant change in group affiliations--away from traditional civic organizations--Wuthnow shows that there has been a corresponding movement toward affiliations that respond to individual needs and collective concerns. Many Americans are finding new and original ways to help one another through short-term task-oriented networks. Some are combining occupational skills with community interests in nonprofit and voluntary associations. Others use communication technologies, such as the World Wide Web, to connect with like-minded people in distant locations. And people are joining less formal associations, such as support groups and lobbying efforts, within their home communities.

People are still connected, but because of the realities of daily life, they form "loose connections." These more fluid groups are better suited to dealing with today's needs than the fraternal orders and ladies' auxiliaries of the past. Wuthnow looks at the challenges that must be faced if these innovative forms of civic involvement are to flourish, and calls for resources to be made available to strengthen the more constructive and civic dimensions of these organizations. This book helps us to understand and encourage the community spirit of today.

Laurence Wylie’s remarkably warm and human account of life in the rural French village he calls Peyrane vividly depicts the villagers themselves within the framework of a systematic description of their culture. Since 1950, when Wylie began his study of Peyrane, to which he has returned on many occasions since, France has become a primarily industrial nation—and French village life has changed in many ways. The third edition of this book includes a fascinating new chapter based on Wylie’s observations of Peyrane since 1970, with discussions of the Peyranais’ gradual assimilation into the outside world they once staunchly resisted, the flux of the village population, and the general transformation in the character of French rural communities.

Jeffries Wyman (1814–74), a pioneer anthropologist of nineteenth-century America and one of its great comparative anatomists, was the Hersey Professor of Anatomy at Harvard University and, later, a trustee of the Peabody Museum and professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology.

Wyman wrote the 59 letters in this volume to his only son Jeffie. Dating from 1866, when Jeffie was two, until Wyman’s death in 1874, when Jeffie was ten, the letters reveal a great scientist trying to instill in his son the concepts of acute observation and wonder. Wyman’s charming, quizzical drawings embellish the text, which will be appreciated by children and adults alike.

The Ascension of Authorship traces the history of the idea of the author in the ancient world, beginning with the attribution practices of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. Jed Wyrick explores the testimony of Josephus on the succession of prophetic scribes and their superiority to Greek historiographers, and interprets the formation of the biblical canon in this light.

The Ascension of Authorship also examines the Greek scholarly methodology that questioned traditional connections between names and texts, a methodology perfected by Hellenistic grammarians and inherited by early Christian scholars. Wyrick argues that the fusion of Jewish and Hellenistic approaches toward attribution helped lead to St. Augustine’s reinvention of the writer of scripture as an author whose texts were governed by both divine will and human intent.

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research

Auschwitz—the largest and most notorious of Hitler’s concentration camps—was founded in 1940, but the Nazis had been detaining Jews in camps ever since they came to power in 1933. Before Auschwitz unearths the little-known origins of the concentration camp system in the years before World War II and reveals the instrumental role of these extralegal detention sites in the development of Nazi policies toward Jews and in plans to create a racially pure Third Reich.

Investigating more than a dozen camps, from the infamous Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen to less familiar sites, Kim Wünschmann uncovers a process of terror meant to identify and isolate German Jews in the period from 1933 to 1939. The concentration camp system was essential to a regime then testing the limits of its power and seeking to capture the hearts and minds of the German public. Propagandized by the Nazis as enemies of the state, Jews were often targeted for arbitrary arrest and then routinely subjected to the harshest treatment and most punishing labor assignments in the camps. Some of them were murdered. Over time, shocking accounts of camp life filtered into the German population, sending a message that Jews were different from true Germans: they were portrayed as dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence.

Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored archives, Before Auschwitz explains how the concentration camps evolved into a universally recognized symbol of Nazi terror and Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.