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Tactical Urbanism for Librarians
Quick, Low-Cost Ways to Make Big Changes
Karen Munro
American Library Association, 2017

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Taking Society's Measure
A Personal History of Survey Research
Herbert Hyman
Russell Sage Foundation, 1991
How are we, as members of a society, informed of conditions that affect our social welfare? How does the government register the impact of its actions on its citizens? The turbulent 1930s saw the emergence of sample survey research as an increasingly valuable technique of social inquiry. Perhaps no one championed this nascent discipline as vigorously as Herbert Hyman, one of those pioneering investigators whose talents were so closely associated with the rapid growth of survey research that their professional careers and reputations became virtually indistinguishable from the field itself. Hyman's personal account is a remarkable contribution to the history and sociology of social research. His experiences with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Office of War Information, the U.S. Bombing Surveys of Germany and Japan, the National Opinion Research Center, and the Bureau of Applied Social Research are all documented with fascinating insight into the critical events and prominent individuals that shaped the field of survey research between the late 1930s and the late 1950s.
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Tashkent
Forging a Soviet City, 1930–1966
Paul Stronski
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

Paul Stronski tells the fascinating story of Tashkent, an ethnically diverse, primarily Muslim city that became the prototype for the Soviet-era reimagining of urban centers in Central Asia. Based on extensive research in Russian and Uzbek archives, Stronski shows us how Soviet officials, planners, and architects strived to integrate local ethnic traditions and socialist ideology into a newly constructed urban space and propaganda showcase.


The Soviets planned to transform Tashkent from a “feudal city” of the tsarist era into a “flourishing garden,” replete with fountains, a lakeside resort, modern roadways, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and of course, factories. The city was intended to be a shining example to the world of the successful assimilation of a distinctly non-Russian city and its citizens through the catalyst of socialism. As Stronski reveals, the physical building of this Soviet city was not an end in itself, but rather a means to change the people and their society.


    Stronski analyzes how the local population of Tashkent reacted to, resisted, and eventually acquiesced to the city’s socialist transformation. He records their experiences of the Great Terror, World War II, Stalin’s death, and the developments of the Krushchev and Brezhnev eras up until the earthquake of 1966, which leveled large parts of the city. Stronski finds that the Soviets established a legitimacy that transformed Tashkent and its people into one of the more stalwart supporters of the regime through years of political and cultural changes and finally during the upheavals of glasnost.  

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The TDR Handbook
Designing and Implementing Transfer of Development Rights Programs
Arthur C. Nelson, Rick Pruetz, and Doug Woodruff with James C. Nicholas, JulianConrad Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Witten
Island Press, 2011
"Transfer of Development Rights" (TDR) programs allow local governments to put economic principles to work in encouraging good land use planning. TDR programs most often permit landowners to forfeit development rights in areas targeted for preservation and then sell those development rights to buyers who want to increase the density of development in areas designated as growth areas by local authorities.
 
Although TDR programs must conform to zoning laws, they provide market incentives that make them more equitable (and often more lucrative) for sellers and frequently benefit buyers by allowing them to receive prior approval for their high-density development plans. Since the 1970s when modern TDR applications were first conceived, more than 200 communities in 33 states across the U.S. have implemented TDR-based programs. The most common uses of TDR to date involve protecting farmland, environmentally sensitive land, historic sites, and "rural character," and urban revitalization.
 
Until now, however, there has never been a clearly written, one-volume book on the subject. At last, The TDR Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to every aspect of TDR programs, from the thinking behind them to the nuts and bolts of implementation-including statutory guidance, model ordinances, suggestions for program administration, and comparisons with other types of preservation programs. In addition, six of its twenty chapters are devoted to case studies of all major uses to which TDR programs have been utilized to date, including recent urban revitalization projects that utilize TDR principles.
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Teaching in America
The Slow Revolution
Gerald Grant and Christine E. Murray
Harvard University Press, 1999

If the essential acts of teaching are the same for schoolteachers and professors, why are they seen as members of quite separate professions? Would the nation's schools be better served if teachers shared more of the authority that professors have long enjoyed? Will a slow revolution be completed that enables schoolteachers to take charge of their practice--to shoulder more responsibility for hiring, mentoring, promoting, and, if necessary, firing their peers?

This book explores these questions by analyzing the essential acts of teaching in a way that will help all teachers become more thoughtful practitioners. It presents portraits of teachers (most of them women) struggling to take control of their practice in a system dominated by an administrative elite (mostly male). The educational system, Gerald Grant and Christine Murray argue, will be saved not by better managers but by better teachers. And the only way to secure them is by attracting talented recruits, developing their skills, and instituting better means of assessing teachers' performance.

Grant and Murray describe the evolution of the teaching profession over the last hundred years, and then focus in depth on recent experiments that gave teachers the power to shape their schools and mentor young educators. The authors conclude by analyzing three equally possible scenarios depicting the role of teachers in 2020.

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Teaching in the Terrordome
Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America
Heather Kirn Lanier
University of Missouri Press, 2012
Only 50 percent of kids growing up in poverty will earn a high school diploma. Just one in ten will graduate college. Compelled by these troubling statistics, Heather Kirn Lanier joined Teach For America (TFA), a program that thrusts eager but inexperienced college graduates into America’s most impoverished areas to teach, asking them to do whatever is necessary to catch their disadvantaged kids up to the rest of the nation.
With little more than a five-week teacher boot camp and the knowledge that David Simon referred to her future school as “The Terrordome,” the altruistic and naïve Lanier devoted herself to attaining the program’s goals but met obstacles on all fronts. The building itself was in such poor condition that tiles fell from the ceiling at random. Kids from the halls barged into classes all day, disrupting even the most carefully planned educational activities. In the middle of one lesson, a wandering student lit her classroom door on fire. Some colleagues, instantly suspicious of TFA’s intentions, withheld their help and supplies. (“They think you’re trying to ‘save’ the children,” one teacher said.) And although high school students can be by definition resistant, in west Baltimore they threw eggs, slashed tires, and threatened teachers’ lives. Within weeks, Lanier realized that the task she was charged with—achieving quantifiable gains in her students’ learning—would require something close to a miracle.
Superbly written and timely, Teaching in the Terrordome casts an unflinching gaze on one of America’s “dropout factory” high schools. Though Teach For America often touts its most successful teacher stories, in this powerful memoir Lanier illuminates a more common experience of “Teaching For America” with thoughtful complexity, a poet’s eye, and an engaging voice. As hard as Lanier worked to become a competent teacher, she found that in “The Terrordome,” idealism wasn’t enough. To persevere, she had to rely on grit, humility, a little comedy, and a willingness to look failure in the face. As she adjusted to a chaotic school administration, crumbling facilities, burned-out colleagues, and students who perceived their school for the failure it was, she gained perspective on the true state of the crisis TFA sets out to solve. Ultimately, she discovered that contrary to her intentions, survival in the so-called Charm City was a high expectation.
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Teaching Information Literacy Online
Trudi E. Jacobson
American Library Association, 2011

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The Teacup Ministry and Other Stories
Subtle Boundaries of Class
By Rhoda H. Halperin
University of Texas Press, 2001

In the global world of the twenty-first century, class boundaries are subtle and permeable, though real nonetheless. Markers of identity, authenticity, and belonging can change with a gesture or a glance, making people feel they do or don't belong in certain places, with certain people, at certain times. In these powerfully written ethnographic stories, Rhoda Halperin maps the boundaries of class by examining three themes: crossing class boundaries, class creativity, and class vulnerability.

In telling these stories, Halperin draws on a wealth of ethnographic experiences in this country and abroad. Her book challenges class stereotypes in ways that touch on universals across cultures and over time.

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Technological Shortcuts to Social Change
Amitai Etzioni
Russell Sage Foundation, 1973
Evaluates a technological approach to social change which seeks to cure society's ills by dealing with its symptoms, rather than root causes. It examines four such technological shortcuts in terms of their relevance to specific social problems: methadone in controlling heroin addiction; antabuse in treating alcoholism; the breath analyzer in highway safety; and gun control in reducing crime. The authors seek solutions which do not require large amounts of new resources or planning, and will accelerate the pace of social change. They indicate that technological handling of such problems may be the answer.
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Technological Turf Wars
A Case Study of the Computer Antivirus Industry
Jessica Johnston
Temple University Press, 2008

In Technological Turf Wars, Jessica Johnston analyzes the tensions and political dilemmas that coexist in the interrelationship among science, technology and society. Illustrating how computer security is as concerned with social relationships as it is with technology, Johnston provides an illuminating ethnography that considers corporate culture and the workplace environment of the antivirus industry.

Using a qualitative, interdisciplinary approach, which combines organizational and security studies with critical and social analysis of science and technology, Johnston questions the motivations, contradictions and negotiations of antivirus professionals. She examines the tensions between the service ethics and profit motives—does the industry release viruses to generate demand for antivirus software?—and considers the dynamics within companies by looking at facets such as gender bias and power politics. Technological Turf Wars is an informed, enlightened and entertaining view of how the production of computer security technology is fraught with social issues.

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Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum
Bridget M. Haas
Ohio University Press, 2019

Across the globe, migration has been met with intensifying modes of criminalization and securitization, and claims for political asylum are increasingly met with suspicion. Asylum seekers have become the focus of global debates surrounding humanitarian obligations, on the one hand, and concerns surrounding national security and border control, on the other. In Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum, contributors provide fine-tuned analyses of political asylum systems and the adjudication of asylum claims across a range of sociocultural and geopolitical contexts.

The contributors to this timely volume, drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives, offer critical insights into the processes by which tensions between humanitarianism and security are negotiated at the local level, often with negative consequences for asylum seekers. By investigating how a politics of suspicion within asylum systems is enacted in everyday practices and interactions, the authors illustrate how asylum seekers are often produced as suspicious subjects by the very systems to which they appeal for protection.

Contributors: Ilil Benjamin, Carol Bohmer, Nadia El-Shaarawi, Bridget M. Haas, John Beard Haviland, Marco Jacquemet, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Rachel Lewis, Sara McKinnon, Amy Shuman, Charles Watters

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Technology Disaster Response and Recovery Planning
A LITA Guide
Mary Mallery
American Library Association, 2015

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Teenage Wasteland
Suburbia's Dead End Kids
Donna Gaines
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Teenage Wasteland provides memorable portraits of "rock and roll kids" and shrewd analyses of their interests in heavy metal music and Satanism. A powerful indictment of the often manipulative media coverage of youth crises and so-called alternative programs designed to help "troubled" teens, Teenage Wasteland draws new conclusions and presents solid reasons to admire the resilience of suburbia's dead end kids.

"A powerful book."—Samuel G. Freedman, New York Times Book Review

"[Gaines] sheds light on a poorly understood world and raises compelling questions about what society might do to help this alienated group of young people."—Ann Grimes, Washington Post Book World

"There is no comparable study of teenage suburban culture . . . and very few ethnographic inquiries written with anything like Gaines's native gusto or her luminous eye for detail."—Andrew Ross, Transition

"An outstanding case study. . . . Gaines shows how teens engage in cultural production and how such social agency is affected by economic transformations and institutional interventions."—Richard Lachman, Contemporary Sociology

"The best book on contemporary youth culture."—Rolling Stone
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Telling Stories
Perspectives on Longitudinal Writing Research
Jenn Fishman
Utah State University Press, 2023

In Telling Stories, more than a dozen longitudinal writing researchers look beyond conventional project findings to story their work and, in doing so, offer otherwise unavailable glimpses into the logics and logistics of long-range studies of writing. The result is a volume that centers interrelations among people, places, and politics across two decades of praxis and an array of educational sites: two-year colleges, a senior military college, an adult literacy center, a small liberal arts college, and both public and private four-year universities.

Contributors share direct knowledge of longitudinal writing research, citing project data (e.g., interview transcripts, research notes, and journals), descriptions drawn from memory, and extended personal reflections. The resulting stories, tempered by the research and scholarship of others, convey a sense of longitudinal research as a lived activity as well as a prominent and consequential approach to inquiry. Yet Telling Stories is not a how-to guide, nor is it written for longitudinal researchers alone. Instead, this volume addresses issues about writing research that are germane to all who conduct or count on it. Such topics include building and sustaining good interpersonal research relations, ethically negotiating the institutional power dynamics that undergird writing research, effectively using knowledge from longitudinal studies to advocate for writers and writing educators, and improving both conceptual and concrete resources for long-range research in writing studies.

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Telling the Technical Services Story
Communicating Value
Kimberley A. Edwards
American Library Association, 2021

Technical Services isn’t the hidden discipline it once was. Even so, despite all the cross-departmental interaction, misconceptions about the work are all too common. It’s incumbent on technical services staff to take a proactive approach by communicating to others their value to the library and institutional mission. Spotlighting several successful initiatives, this collection will give you the guidance to bolster communication within departments, across the library, and campus-wide. You’ll learn about

  • applying the 7 principles of communities of practice to break down silos;
  • software such as Trello, Basecamp, and Confluence that can improve communications workflows;
  • ticketing systems and training to help frontline staff solve e-resource access problems;
  • engaging faculty in collection decisions using a mix of communication channels;
  • how informational classes on metadata can improve the work of staff across the library;
  • supporting research data management through metadata outreach; 
  • using focus groups to develop shared expectations with subject librarians;
  • 4 narrative strategies to market library resources;
  • using infographics as a dynamic way to illustrate progress in a collection management program;
  • developing an external communication plan for a library de-selection project;
  • using portfolio management to collaboratively implement new services; and
  • planning a cross-departmental retreat.
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Terra Incognita
Vacant Land and Urban Strategies
Ann O’M. Bowman and Michael A. Pagano
Georgetown University Press, 2004

Boon or blight? Ann Bowman and Michael Pagano define "vacant land" broadly, to include everything from brownfields (environmentally contaminated land) through trashed lots and abandoned buildings to greenspace (parks, community gardens, etc.). Terra Incognita takes a fresh look at what they believe can be the ultimate urban resource. Beyond the common studies of the influence of market forces, it explores how these areas are affected by the decisions of local governments, and then shows how vacant land can be a valuable strategic asset for localities.

Terra Incognita derives from what—until now—has been the lack of substantial information about the amount and the diversity of urban vacant land. This book is based on an unprecedented survey sent to all U.S. towns with a population greater than 50,000, and contains data previously unavailable. Three cities were studied in greater depth for detailed case studies: the greater Phoenix and Seattle areas and Philadelphia-Camden. A number of other cities are cited frequently, including Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Oklahoma City, among many others.

Identifying the fiscal, social, and development imperatives that drive the decisions local officials make about using vacant land, Bowman and Pagano pay particular attention to the varying dynamics of sales, property, and income taxes, and conclude with a model for making strategic decisions about land use based on a city's priorities.

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Territories of Difference
Place, Movements, Life, Redes
Arturo Escobar
Duke University Press, 2008
In Territories of Difference, Arturo Escobar, author of the widely debated book Encountering Development, analyzes the politics of difference enacted by specific place-based ethnic and environmental movements in the context of neoliberal globalization. His analysis is based on his many years of engagement with a group of Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia’s Pacific rainforest region, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). Escobar offers a detailed ethnographic account of PCN’s visions, strategies, and practices, and he chronicles and analyzes the movement’s struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition. Yet he also does much more. Consistently emphasizing the value of local activist knowledge for both understanding and social action and drawing on multiple strands of critical scholarship, Escobar proposes new ways for scholars and activists to examine and apprehend the momentous, complex processes engulfing regions such as the Colombian Pacific today.

Escobar illuminates many interrelated dynamics, including the Colombian government’s policies of development and pluralism that created conditions for the emergence of black and indigenous social movements and those movements’ efforts to steer the region in particular directions. He examines attempts by capitalists to appropriate the rainforest and extract resources, by developers to set the region on the path of modernist progress, and by biologists and others to defend this incredibly rich biodiversity “hot-spot” from the most predatory activities of capitalists and developers. He also looks at the attempts of academics, activists, and intellectuals to understand all of these complicated processes. Territories of Difference is Escobar’s effort to think with Afro-Colombian intellectual-activists who aim to move beyond the limits of Eurocentric paradigms as they confront the ravages of neoliberal globalization and seek to defend their place-based cultures and territories.

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Texas Monthly On . . .
Texas True Crime
From the editors of Texas Monthly
University of Texas Press, 2007

Since 1973, one magazine has covered crime in Texas like no one else, delving deep into stories that may turn your stomach—but won't let you turn away. Texas Monthly On... Texas True Crime is a high-speed read around Texas, chasing criminals from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods, through gated mansions and trailer parks, from 1938 to the twenty-first century. The stories, which originally appeared as articles in the magazine, come from some of its most notable writers: Cecilia Ballí investigates the drug-fueled violence of the border; Pamela Colloff reports on Amarillo's lethal feud between jocks and punks; Michael Hall re-visits the legend of Joe Ball, a saloon owner who allegedly fed his waitresses to pet alligators; Skip Hollandsworth uncovers the computer nerd who became Dallas' most notorious jewel thief; and Katy Vine tracks a pair of teenage lesbians inspired by Thelma and Louise.

Texas Monthly On... Texas True Crime is the second in a series of books in which the editors of Texas Monthly offer the magazine's inimitable perspective on various aspects of Texas culture, including food, politics, travel, and music, among other topics. Texas Monthly On... Texas Women was released in 2006.

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Texas Monthly On . . .
Texas Women
From the editors of Texas Monthly
University of Texas Press, 2006

Since 1973, Texas Monthly has spotlighted hundreds of Texans who, for better or worse, make this state like no place else. TEXAS MONTHLY On . . . Texas Women profiles thirteen women who are not only fascinating in their own right, but also representative of the legions of women who have contributed to the character and uniqueness of Texas. They range from First Ladies Laura Bush and Lady Bird Johnson to pop culture icons such as Candy Barr and Janis Joplin—and all of them exemplify the qualities that make Texas women distinctive. The women's profiles originally appeared as articles in the magazine, authored by some of Texas Monthly's notable writers—Cecilia Ballí, Gary Cartwright, Paul Burka, Mimi Swartz, Jan Jarboe Russell, Skip Hollandsworth, Robert Draper, William Broyles Jr., Jan Reid, Joe Nick Patoski, Pamela Colloff, and Helen Thorpe. The writers also introduce their pieces with headnotes that update the stories or, in some cases, tell the story behind the story.

TEXAS MONTHLY On . . . Texas Women is the first in a series of books in which the editors of Texas Monthly will offer the magazine's inimitable perspective on various aspects of Texas culture, including food, politics, travel, and music, among other topics.

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Textbooks in Academic Libraries
Selection, Circulation, and Assessment
Chris Diaz
American Library Association, 2017

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The Theater Will Rock
A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig
Elizabeth L. Wollman
University of Michigan Press, 2010
The tumultuous decade of the 1960s in America gave birth to many new ideas and forms of expression, among them the rock musical. An unlikely offspring of the performing arts, the rock musical appeared when two highly distinctive and American art forms joined onstage in New York City. The Theater Will Rock explores the history of the rock musical, which has since evolved to become one of the most important cultural influences on American musical theater and a major cultural export. Packed with candid commentary by members of New York's vibrant theater community, The Theater Will Rock traces the rock musical's evolution over nearly fifty years, in popular productions such as Hair, The Who's Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Little Shop of Horrors, Rent, and Mamma Mia!---and in notable flops such as The Capeman.
"A much-needed study of the impact of rock music on the musical theater and its resulting challenges, complexities, failures, and successes. Anyone interested in Broadway will learn a great deal from this book."
---William Everett, author of The Musical: A Research Guide to Musical Theatre
"This well-written account puts the highs and lows of producing staged rock musicals in New York City into perspective and is well worth reading for the depth of insight it provides."
---Studies in Musical Theatre

Elizabeth L. Wollman is Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College, City University of New York.
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A Theory of Public Bureaucracy
Politics, Personality, and Organization in the State Department
Donald P. Warwick
Harvard University Press, 1975
Based mainly on State Department materials, but addressing generic problems of organizational politics as well, this book provides a fresh, intelligent, and lively account of bureaucratic behavior.
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There Goes the Hood
Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up
Lance Freeman
Temple University Press, 2006
In this revealing book, Lance Freeman sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: how does gentrification actually affect residents of neighborhoods in transition? To find out, Freeman does what no scholar before him has done. He interviews the indigenous residents of two predominantly black neighborhoods that are in the process of gentrification: Harlem and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. By listening closely to what people tell him, he creates a more nuanced picture of the impacts of gentrification on the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of the people who stay in their neighborhoods. Freeman describes the theoretical and planning/policy implications of his findings, both for New York City and for any gentrifying urban area. There Goes the 'Hood provides a more complete, and complicated, understanding of the gentrification process, highlighting the reactions of long-term residents. It suggests new ways of limiting gentrification's negative effects and of creating more positive experiences for newcomers and natives alike.
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They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933–45
Milton Mayer
University of Chicago Press, 2017
“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”
 
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.
 
They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
 
A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.
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They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer
University of Chicago Press, 1966
First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”--from Chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late”
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Third Hand
Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism
Charles Green
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
A major reevaluation of collaboration's role in art since 1968. The lone artist is a worn cliché of art history but one that still defines how we think about the production of art. Since the 1960s, however, a number of artists have challenged this image by embarking on long-term collaborations that dramatically altered the terms of artistic identity. In The Third Hand, Charles Green offers a sustained critical examination of collaboration in international contemporary art, tracing its origins from the evolution of conceptual art in the 1960s into such stylistic labels as Earth Art, Systems Art, Body Art, and Performance Art. During this critical period, artists around the world began testing the limits of what art could be, how it might be produced, and who the artist is. Collaboration emerged as a prime way to reframe these questions. Green looks at three distinct types of collaboration: the highly bureaucratic identities created by Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden and other members of Art & Language in the late 1960s; the close-knit relationships based on marriage or lifetime partnership as practiced by the Boyle Family--Anne and Patrick Poirier, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison; and couples-like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gilbert & George, or Marina Abramovic and Ulay--who developed third identities, effacing the individual artists almost entirely. These collaborations, Green contends, resulted in new and, at times, extreme authorial models that continue to inform current thinking about artistic identity and to illuminate the origins of postmodern art, suggesting, in the process, a new genealogy for art in the twenty-first century. "Green makes an original and important contribution to the study of western art of the second half of the twentieth century. A valuable book for all readers." --Art & Australia Charles Green is an artist and a lecturer in the School of Art History and Theory at the University of New South Wales. He is the Australian correspondent for Artforum magazine and author of Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-94 (1995).
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Threads
Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry
Jane L. Collins
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Americans have been shocked by media reports of the dismal working conditions in factories that make clothing for U.S. companies. But while well intentioned, many of these reports about child labor and sweatshop practices rely on stereotypes of how Third World factories operate, ignoring the complex economic dynamics driving the global apparel industry.

To dispel these misunderstandings, Jane L. Collins visited two very different apparel firms and their factories in the United States and Mexico. Moving from corporate headquarters to factory floors, her study traces the diverse ties that link First and Third World workers and managers, producers and consumers. Collins examines how the transnational economics of the apparel industry allow firms to relocate or subcontract their work anywhere in the world, making it much harder for garment workers in the United States or any other country to demand fair pay and humane working conditions.

Putting a human face on globalization, Threads shows not only how international trade affects local communities but also how workers can organize in this new environment to more effectively demand better treatment from their distant corporate employers.
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Through Japanese Eyes
Thirty Years of Studying Aging in America
Yohko Tsuji
Rutgers University Press, 2021
In Through Japanese Eyes, based on her thirty-year research at a senior center in upstate New York, anthropologist Yohko Tsuji describes old age in America from a cross-cultural perspective. Comparing aging in America and in her native Japan, she discovers that notable differences in the panhuman experience of aging are rooted in cultural differences between these two countries, and that Americans have strongly negative attitudes toward aging because it represents the antithesis of cherished American values, especially independence. Tsuji reveals that American culture, despite its seeming lack of guidance for those aging, plays a pivotal role in elders’ lives, simultaneously assisting and constraining them. Furthermore, the author’s lengthy period of research illustrates major changes in her interlocutors’ lives, incorporating their declines and death, and significant shifts in the culture of aging in American society as Tsuji herself gets to know American culture and grows into senescence herself.

Through Japanese Eyes offers an ethnography of aging in America from a cross-cultural perspective based on a lengthy period of research. It illustrates how older Americans cope with the gap between the ideal (e.g., independence) and the real (e.g., needing assistance) of growing older, and the changes the author observed over thirty years of research.
 
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Through My Own Eyes
Single Mothers and the Cultures of Poverty
Susan Holloway, Bruce Fuller, Marylee F. Rambaud, and Costanza Eggers-Piérola
Harvard University Press, 2001

Shirl is a single mother who urges her son's baby-sitter to swat him when he misbehaves. Helena went back to work to get off welfare, then quit to be with her small daughter. Kathy was making good money but got into cocaine and had to give up her two-year-old son during her rehabilitation. Pundits, politicians, and social critics have plenty to say about such women and their behavior. But in this book, for the first time, we hear what these women have to say for themselves. An eye-opening--and heart-rending--account from the front lines of poverty, Through My Own Eyes offers a firsthand look at how single mothers with the slimmest of resources manage from day to day. We witness their struggles to balance work and motherhood and watch as they negotiate a bewildering maze of child-care and social agencies.

For three years the authors followed the lives of fourteen women from poor Boston neighborhoods, all of whom had young children and had been receiving welfare intermittently. We learn how these women keep their families on firm footing and try--frequently in vain--to gain ground. We hear how they find child-care and what they expect from it, as well as what the childcare providers have to say about serving low-income families. Holloway and Fuller view these lives in the context of family policy issues touching on the disintegration of inner cities, welfare reform, early childhood and "pro-choice" poverty programs.

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Ties That Bind
Charles Jacobson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001

In the early days of utility development, municipalities sought to shape the new systems in a variety of ways even as private firms struggled to retain control and fend off competition. In scope and consequence, some of the battles dwarfed the contemporary one between local jurisdictions and cable companies over broadband access to the Internet.  

In this comparative historical study, Jacobson draws upon economic theory to shed light on relationships between technology, market forces, and problems of governance that have arisen in connection with different utility networks over the past two hundred years. He focuses on water, electric, and cable television utility networks and on experiences in four major American cities—Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh, arguing that information and transactions costs have played decisive roles in determining how different ownership and regulatory arrangements have functioned in different situations.

Using primary sources and bold conceptualizations, Jacobson begins his study by examining the creation of centralized water systems in the first half of the nineteenth century, moves to the building of electric utilities from the 1880s to the 1980s, and concludes with an analysis of cable television franchising from the 1960s to the 1980s. Ties That Bind addresses highly practical questions of how to make ownership, regulatory, and contracting arrangements work better and also explores broader concerns about private monopoly and the role of government in society.

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Time Slips
Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History
Jaclyn I. Pryor
Northwestern University Press, 2017
This bold book investigates how performance can transform the way people perceive trauma and memory, time and history. Jaclyn I. Pryor introduces the concept of "time slips," moments in which past, present, and future coincide, moments that challenge American narratives of racial and sexual citizenship.
 
Framing performance as a site of resistance, Pryor analyzes their own work and that of four other queer artists—Ann Carlson, Mary Ellen Strom, Peggy Shaw, and Lisa Kron—between 2001 and 2016. Pryor illuminates how each artist deploys performance as a tool to render history visible, trauma recognizable, and transformation possible by laying bare the histories and ongoing systems of violence woven deep into our society. Pryor also includes a case study that examines the challenges of teaching queer time and queer performance within the academy in what Pryor calls a post-9/11 “homeland” security state.
 
Masterfully synthesizing a wealth of research and experiences, Time Slips will interest scholars and readers in the fields of theater and performance studies, queer studies, and American studies.
[more]

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Time-Limited Psychotherapy
James Mann
Harvard University Press, 1973

Waiting lists in psychiatric clinics and increasing numbers of patients in long-term psychotherapy have highlighted the need for shorter methods of treatment. Existing forms of short-term psychotherapy tend to be vague and uncertain, lacking as they do a clearly formulated rationale and methodology.

The bold and challenging technique for brief psychotherapy designed around the factor of time itself, which James Mann introduces here, is a method he hopes will revolutionize current practice. The significance of time in human life is examined in terms of the development of time sense as well as its unconscious meaning and the ways these are experienced in both the categorical and existential senses. The author shows how the interplay between the regressive pressures of the child’s sense of infinite time and the adult reality of categorical time determine the patient’s unconscious expectations of psychotherapy.

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To Know Her Own History
Writing at the Woman’s College, 1943–1963
Kelly Ritter
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012

To Know Her Own History chronicles the evolution of writing programs at a landmark Southern women’s college during the postwar period. Kelly Ritter finds that despite its conservative Southern culture and vocational roots, the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina was a unique setting where advanced writing programs and creativity flourished long before these trends emerged nationally.
      Ritter profiles the history of the Woman’s College, first as a normal school, where women trained as teachers with an emphasis on composition and analytical writing, then as a liberal arts college. She compares the burgeoning writing program here to those of the Seven Sisters (Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, Barnard, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Mount Holyoke) and to elite all-male universities, to show the singular progressivism of the Woman’s College. Ritter presents lively student writing samples from the early postwar period to reveal a blurring of the boundaries between “creative” and “expository” styles.
      By midcentury, a quantum shift toward creative writing changed administrators’ valuation of composition courses and staff at the Woman’s College. An intensive process of curricular revisions, modeled after Harvard’s “Redbook” plan, was proposed and rejected in 1951, as the college stood by its unique curricula and singular values. Ritter follows the plight of individual instructors of creative writing and composition, showing how their compensation and standing were made disproportionate by the shifting position of expository writing in relation to creative writing. Despite this unsettled period, the Woman’s College continued to gain in stature, and by 1964 it became a prize acquisition of the University of North Carolina system.
      Ritter’s study demonstrates the value of local histories to uncover undocumented advancements in writing education, offering insights into the political, cultural, and social conditions that influenced learning and methodologies at “marginalized” schools such as the Woman’s College.
 

[more]

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To See Ourselves as Others See Us
How Publics Abroad View the United States after 9/11
Ole R. Holsti
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"Holsti, the authority on American foreign policy attitudes, investigates others' views of us. It's not pretty. It matters. Read this."
---Bruce Russett, Dean Acheson Professor of International Relations, Yale University, and editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution

"Clearly and engagingly written, Holsti's book ranks among the most important---and most objective---of the post-9/11 scholarly studies. It deserves a large readership, both within and beyond academe."
---Ralph Levering, Vail Professor of History, Davidson College

In terms of military and economic power, the United States remains one of the strongest nations in the world. Yet the United States seems to have lost the power of persuasion, the ability to make allies and win international support.

Why? Immediately after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, leaders and citizens of foreign nations generally expressed sympathy for the United States. Since then, attitudes have changed. Drawing upon public opinion surveys conducted in 30 nations, Ole R. Holsti documents an increasing anti-American sentiment. His analysis suggests that the war in Iraq, human rights violations, and unpopular international policies are largely responsible. Consequently, the United States can rebuild its repute by adopting an unselfish, farsighted approach to global issues.

Indeed, the United States must restore goodwill abroad, Holsti asserts, because public opinion indirectly influences the leaders who decide whether or not to side with the Americans.

Ole R. Holsti is George V. Allen Professor Emeritus of International Affairs in the Department of Political Science at Duke University and author of Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy.

[more]

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Tommy Gun Winter
Jewish Gangsters, a Preacher's Daughter, and the Trial That Shocked 1930s Boston
Nathan Gorenstein
University Press of New England, 2015
This is the true tale of two brothers, sons of a successful Jewish contractor, who along with an MIT graduate and a minister’s daughter once competed for headlines with John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde. The gang was led by the angry, violent, yet often charismatic Murton Millen, a small-time hoodlum and aspiring race-car driver. With his younger brother, Irv, and later joined by neighborhood buddy and MIT graduate Abe Faber, Murt launched a career of increasingly ambitious robberies. But it was only after his sudden marriage to the beautiful eighteen-year-old Norma Brighton that the gang escalated to murder. Their crime wave climaxed at a Needham, Massachusetts, bank on February 2, 1934, when Murt cut down two local police officers—Francis Haddock and Forbes McLeod—with a Thompson submachine gun stolen from state police. The killings, the dogged investigation by two clever detectives, and the record-setting trial with seventeen psychiatrists were national news. In Depression-era America this Boston saga of sex, ethnicity, and bloodshed made the trio and their “red-headed gun moll” infamous. Gorenstein’s account explores the Millen, Faber, and Brighton families and introduces us to cops, psychiatrists, newspaper men and women, and ordinary citizens caught up in the extraordinary Tommy Gun Winter of 1934.
[more]

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Toms River
A Story of Science and Salvation
Dan Fagin
Island Press, 2015
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • Winner of The New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award
A new classic of science reporting.”—The New York Times


The true story of a small town ravaged by industrial pollution, Toms River won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize and has been hailed by The New York Times as "a new classic of science reporting." Now available in paperback with a new afterword by acclaimed author Dan Fagin, the book masterfully blends hard-hitting investigative journalism, scientific discovery, and unforgettable characters.

One of New Jersey’s seemingly innumerable quiet seaside towns, Toms River became the unlikely setting for a decades-long drama that culminated in 2001 with one of the largest environmental legal settlements in history. For years, large chemical companies had been using Toms River as their private dumping ground, burying tens of thousands of leaky drums in open pits and discharging billions of gallons of acid-laced wastewater into the town’s namesake river. The result was a notorious cluster of childhood cancers scientifically linked to local air and water pollution.

Fagin recounts the sixty-year saga of rampant pollution and inadequate oversight that made Toms River a cautionary tale. He brings to life the pioneering scientists and physicians who first identified pollutants as a cause of cancer and the everyday people in Toms River who struggled for justice: a young boy whose cherubic smile belied the fast-growing tumors that had decimated his body from birth; a nurse who fought to bring the alarming incidence of childhood cancers to the attention of authorities who didn’t want to listen; and a mother whose love for her stricken child transformed her into a tenacious advocate for change.

Rooted in a centuries-old scientific quest, Toms River is an epic of dumpers at midnight and deceptions in broad daylight, of corporate avarice and government neglect, and of a few brave individuals who refused to keep silent until the truth was exposed.
[more]

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Torpedo
Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain
Katherine C. Epstein
Harvard University Press, 2014

When President Eisenhower referred to the “military–industrial complex” in his 1961 Farewell Address, he summed up in a phrase the merger of government and industry that dominated the Cold War United States. In this bold reappraisal, Katherine Epstein uncovers the origins of the military–industrial complex in the decades preceding World War I, as the United States and Great Britain struggled to perfect a crucial new weapon: the self-propelled torpedo.

Torpedoes epitomized the intersection of geopolitics, globalization, and industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century. They threatened to revolutionize naval warfare by upending the delicate balance among the world’s naval powers. They were bought and sold in a global marketplace, and they were cutting-edge industrial technologies. Building them, however, required substantial capital investments and close collaboration among scientists, engineers, businessmen, and naval officers. To address these formidable challenges, the U.S. and British navies created a new procurement paradigm: instead of buying finished armaments from the private sector or developing them from scratch at public expense, they began to invest in private-sector research and development. The inventions emerging from torpedo R&D sparked legal battles over intellectual property rights that reshaped national security law.

Blending military, legal, and business history with the history of science and technology, Torpedo recasts the role of naval power in the run-up to World War I and exposes how national security can clash with property rights in the modern era.

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Traditional and Modern Natural Resource Management in Latin America
Management In Latin America
Francisco J. Pichon
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999

This book identifies a major problem facing developing nations and the countries and sources that fund them: the lack of attention and/or effective strategies available to prevent farmers in underdeveloped and poorly endowed regions from sinking still deeper into poverty while avoiding further degradation of marginal environments. The contributors propose an alliance of scientific knowledge with native skill as the best way to proceed, arguing that folk systems can often provide effective management solutions that are not only locally effective, but which may have the potential for spatial diffusion. While this has been said before, the volume makes one of the best articulated statements of how to implement such an approach.

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Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity
Diversity and Drift
Martin A. Levin and Martin Shapiro, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2004

Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity integrates the study of politics and public policy across a broad spectrum of regulatory and social welfare policies in the United States and several nations of Western Europe. The editors and a sterling list of contributors look at policymaking in the 1990s through the present—providing a comparative politics framework—stressing both parallel development and the differences between and among the nations. Similar prevailing ideas and political factors can be identified and transatlantic comparisons made—providing for a clearer understanding of the policymaking process.

Faith in regulated markets and the burden of rising welfare costs are concerns found on both sides of the Atlantic. Western democracies also share political climates colored by economic austerity; low trust in government, pressures from interest groups, and a sharply divided electorate. Because of differing political processes and differing policy starting points, a variety of disparate policy decisions have resulted.

Real world policymaking in the areas of welfare, health, labor, immigration reform, disability rights, consumer and environmental regulation, administrative reforms, and corporate governance are compared. Ultimately, the last decade is best characterized as one of "drift," sluggish changes with little real innovation and much default to the private sector. In general, policymakers on both sides of the ocean, constrained by economic necessity, have been unable to produce policy outcomes that satisfy the key segments of the electorate.

The contributors examine the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, as well as a number of other European countries, and study the European Union itself as a policymaking institution. Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity distills the prominent issues, politics, and roles played by governmental institutions into a new understanding of the dynamics of policymaking in and among transatlantic nations.

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The Transfer of Cognitive Skill
Mark Singley and John R. Anderson
Harvard University Press, 1989

Does a knowledge of Latin facilitate the learning of computer programming? Does skill in geometry make it easier to learn music? The issue of the transfer of learning from one domain to another is a classic problem in psychology as well as an educational question of great importance, which this ingenious new book sets out to solve through a theory of transfer based on a comprehensive theory of skill acquisition.

The question was first studied systematically at the turn of the century by the noted psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, who proposed a theory of transfer based on common elements in two different tasks. Since then, psychologists of different theoretical orientations—verbal learning, gestalt, and information processing—have addressed the transfer question with differing and inconclusive results. Mark Singley and John Anderson resurrect Thorndike’s theory of identical elements, but in a broader context and from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Making use of a powerful knowledge-representation language, they recast his elements into units of procedural and declarative knowledge in the ACT* theory of skill acquisition. One skill will transfer to another, they argue, to the extent that it involves the same productions or the same declarative precursors. They show that with production rules, transfer can be localized to specific components—in keeping with Thorndike’s theory—and yet still be abstract and mentalistic.

The findings of this book have important implications for psychology and the improvement of teaching. They will interest cognitive scientists and educational psychologists, as well as computer scientists interested in artificial intelligence and cognitive modeling.

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Transforming Environmentalism
Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice
McGurty, Eileen
Rutgers University Press, 2006
Contemporary public policy circles are quick to acknowledge that environmental factors contribute to ill health and pose a particular threat to poor and minority communities. But public officials rarely examined the distribution of environmental hazards such as polluted air and contaminated water. In the 1980s, as toxic waste facilities proliferated, the environmental justice movement demanded that impoverished communities no longer be burdened by excessive environmental risks.    
In Transforming Environmentalism, Eileen McGurty explores a moment central to the emergence of the environmental justice movement. In 1978, residents of predominantly African American Warren County, North Carolina, were horrified to learn that the state planned to build a landfill in their county to hold forty thousand cubic yards of soil that was contaminated with PCBs from illegal dumping. They responded to the state's plans with a four-year resistance, ending in a month of protests with over 500 arrests from civil disobedience and disruptive actions.McGurty traces the evolving approaches that residents took to contest "environmental racism" in their community and shows how activism in Warren County spurred greater political debate and became a model for communities across the nation. Transforming Environmentalism explores how the specific circumstances of the Warren County events shaped the formation of the environmental justice movement and influenced contemporary environmentalism.
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Transforming Information Literacy Instruction Using Learner-Centered Teaching
Joan R. Kaplowitz
American Library Association, 2011

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Transforming Masculine Rule
Agriculture and Rural Development in the European Union
Elisabeth Prügl
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"The premise of mainstreaming gender is to bring equality concerns into every aspect of policy-making, and this brave book offers a close look at how feminists have taken up the challenge to transform the hidden dynamics of male domination in agricultural policy in Europe. In contrast to the automatic assumption that (neo)liberal policy always works against women’s interests, Prügl demonstrates the potential for feminist ju-jitsu to take advantage of multiple levels of governance to empower women in some circumstances. Although feminists were not always successful, the story of their efforts to remake agricultural policy should encourage activists to look for points of leverage in this and other contested and changing multilevel power systems."
---Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin

"Information on policy development, conflicts about improving the status of farm women, and using rural development policies to foster gender equality is hard to access in English and extremely useful for researchers concerned with the specifics of gender equality policy in the EU."
---Alison Woodward, Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

"This book is a must-read for scholars interested in the gendered process of global restructuring. Elisabeth Prügl succeeds superbly in teasing out the power politics involved in European agricultural policy. Through the lens of a feminist-constructivist approach, she makes visible the multiple mechanisms of gendered power within the state. This very lucid narrative is a milestone in a new generation of feminist theoretical scholarship."
---Brigitte Young, University of Muenster, Germany

Taking West and East Germany as case studies, Elisabeth Prügl shows how European agricultural policy has cemented long-standing gender-based inequalities and how feminists have used liberalization as an opportunity to challenge such inequalities. Through a comparison of the EU’s rural development program known as LEADER as it played out in the Altmark region in the German East and in the Danube/Bavarian Forest region in the West, Prügl provides a close-up view of the power politics involved in government policies and programs.

In identifying mechanisms of power (refusal, co-optation, compromise, normalization, and silencing of difference), Prügl illustrates how these mechanisms operate in arguments over gender relations within the state. Her feminist-constructivist approach to global restructuring as a gendered process brings into view multiple levels of governance and the variety of gender constructions operating in different societies. Ultimately, Prügl offers a new understanding of patriarchy as diverse, contested, and in flux.

Jacket photograph: © iStockphoto.com/Wojtek Kryczka

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Trans/Portraits
Voices from Transgender Communities
Jackson Wright Shultz
Dartmouth College Press, 2015
Although transgender people are increasingly represented in academic studies and popular culture, they rarely have the opportunity to add their own voices to the conversation. In this remarkable book, Jackson Shultz records the stories of more than thirty Americans who identify as transgender. They range in age from fifteen to seventy-two; come from twenty-five different states and a wide array of racial, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds; and identify across a vast spectrum of genders and sexualities. Giving voice to a diverse group of individuals, the book raises questions about gender, acceptance, and unconditional love. From historical descriptions of activism to personal stories of discrimination, love, and community, these touching accounts of gender transition shed light on the uncharted territories that lie beyond the gender binary. Despite encounters with familial rejection, drug addiction, and medical malpractice, each account is imbued with optimism and humor, providing a thoughtful look at the daily joys and struggles of transgender life. With an introduction and explanations from the author, this work will appeal to transgender individuals, their significant others, friends, family, and allies; health-care providers, educators, and legal professionals; and anyone questioning their own gender, considering transition, or setting out on their own transition journey.
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Travesti
Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes
Don Kulick
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this dramatic and compelling narrative, anthropologist Don Kulick follows the lives of a group of transgendered prostitutes (called travestis in Portuguese) in the Brazilian city Salvador. Travestis are males who, often beginning at ages as young as ten, adopt female names, clothing styles, hairstyles, and linguistic pronouns. More dramatically, they ingest massive doses of female hormones and inject up to twenty liters of industrial silicone into their bodies to create breasts, wide hips, and large thighs and buttocks. Despite such irreversible physiological changes, virtually no travesti identifies herself as a woman. Moreover, travestis regard any male who does so as mentally disturbed.

Kulick analyzes the various ways travestis modify their bodies, explores the motivations that lead them to choose this particular gendered identity, and examines the complex relationships that they maintain with one another, their boyfriends, and their families. Kulick also looks at how travestis earn their living through prostitution and discusses the reasons prostitution, for most travestis, is a positive and affirmative experience.

Arguing that transgenderism never occurs in a "natural" or arbitrary form, Kulick shows how it is created in specific social contexts and assumes specific social forms. Furthermore, Kulick suggests that travestis—far from deviating from normative gendered expectations—may in fact distill and perfect the messages that give meaning to gender throughout Brazilian society and possibly throughout much of Latin America.

Through Kulick's engaging voice and sharp analysis, this elegantly rendered account is not only a landmark study in its discipline but also a fascinating read for anyone interested in sexuality and gender.
[more]

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Trees, Why Do you Wait?
America's Changing Rural Culture
Richard Critchfield
Island Press, 1991

Richard Critchfield, author of the best-selling books Villages and An American Looks at Britain, examines the inescapable link between the decline of America's rural roots and the decay of our cities. Trees, Why Do You Wait? is a moving oral history chronicling the changes taking place in rural America. Through it, we meet real people of the heartland and feel the suffering and the strength in their relationship to the land.

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The Trials of Eroy Brown
The Murder Case That Shook the Texas Prison System
By Michael Berryhill
University of Texas Press, 2011

In April 1981, two white Texas prison officials died at the hands of a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville. Warden Wallace Pack and farm manager Billy Moore were the highest-ranking Texas prison officials ever to die in the line of duty. The warden was drowned face down in a ditch. The farm manager was shot once in the head with the warden's gun. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered meekly, claiming self-defense.

In any other era of Texas prison history, Brown's fate would have seemed certain: execution. But in 1980, federal judge William Wayne Justice had issued a sweeping civil rights ruling in which he found that prison officials had systematically and often brutally violated the rights of Texas inmates. In the light of that landmark prison civil rights case, Ruiz v. Estelle, Brown had a chance of being believed.

The Trials of Eroy Brown, the first book devoted to Brown's astonishing defense, is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown's three trials, which ended in his acquittal. Michael Berryhill presents Brown's story in his own words, set against the backdrop of the chilling plantation mentality of Texas prisons. Brown's attorneys—Craig Washington, Bill Habern, and Tim Sloan—undertook heroic strategies to defend him, even when the state refused to pay their fees. The Trials of Eroy Brown tells a landmark story of prison civil rights and the collapse of Jim Crow justice in Texas.

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True Stories of Censorship Battles in America's Libraries
Valerie Nye
American Library Association, 2012

Intellectual freedom is a core value of librarianship, but fighting to keep controversial materials on the shelves can sometimes feel like a lonely battle. And not all censorship controversies involve the public objecting to a book in the collection—libraries are venues for displays and meetings, and sometimes library staff themselves are tempted to preemptively censor a work. Those facing censorship challenges can find support and inspiration in this book, which compiles dozens of stories from library front lines. Edifying and enlightening, this collection

  • Tells the stories of librarians who withstood difficult circumstances to champion intellectual freedom
  • Touches on prickly issues such as age-appropriateness, some librarians' temptation to preemptively censor, sensitive cultural expressions, and criminality in the library
  • Presents case studies of defenses that were unsuccessful, so librarians facing similar challenges can learn from these defeats

There are fewer situations more stressful in a librarian's professional life than being personally confronted with a demand to remove a book from the shelves or not knowing how to respond to other kinds of censorship challenges. Reading this book will help fortify and inform those in the fray.

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Truman Capote and the Legacy of "In Cold Blood"
Ralph F. Voss
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Ralph F. Voss was a high school junior in Plainville, Kansas in mid-November of 1959 when four members of the Herbert Clutter family were murdered in Holcomb, Kansas, by “four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives,” an unimaginable horror in a quiet farm community during the Eisenhower years. No one in Kansas or elsewhere could then have foreseen the emergence of Capote’s book–which has never gone out of print, has twice been made into a major motion picture, remains required reading in criminology, American Studies, sociology, and English classes, and has been the source of two recent biographical films.

Voss examines Capote and In Cold Blood from many perspectives, not only as the crowning achievement of Capote’s career, but also as a story in itself, focusing on Capote’s artfully composed text, his extravagant claims for it as reportage, and its larger status in American popular culture.

Voss argues that Capote’s publication of In Cold Blood in 1966 forever transcended his reputation as a first-rate stylist but second-rate writer of  “Southern gothic” fiction; that In Cold Blood actually is a gothic novel, a sophisticated culmination of Capote’s artistic development and interest in lurid regionalism, but one that nonetheless eclipsed him both personally and artistically. He also explores Capote’s famous claim that he created a genre called the “non-fiction novel,” and its status as a foundational work of “true crime” writing as practiced by authors ranging from Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer to James Ellroy, Joe McGinniss, and John Berendt.

Voss also examines Capote’s artful manipulation of the story’s facts and circumstances: his masking of crucial homoerotic elements to enhance its marketability; his need for the killers to remain alive long enough to get the story, and then his need for them to die so that he could complete it; and Capote’s style, his shaping of the narrative, and his selection of details–why it served him to include this and not that, and the effects of such choices—all despite confident declarations that “every word is true.”

Though it’s been nearly 50 years since the Clutter murders and far more gruesome crimes have been documented, In Cold Blood continues to resonate deeply in popular culture. Beyond questions of artistic selection and claims of truth, beyond questions about capital punishment and Capote’s own post-publication dissolution, In Cold Blood’s ongoing relevance stems, argues Voss, from its unmatched role as a touchstone for enduring issues of truth, exploitation, victimization, and the power of narrative.

 

 

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Trust and Hedging in International Relations
Kendall W. Stiles
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Do states trust each other? What are the political and ethical implications of trust? Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, Trust and Hedging in International Relations adds to the emerging literature on trust in international relations by offering a systematic measure of state-to-state trust. Looking at how relationships between European microstates and their partners have evolved over the past few centuries, Stiles finds that rather than trusting, most microstates are careful to hedge in their relations by agreeing only to arrangements that provide them with opt-out clauses, heavy involvement in joint decision-making, and sunset provisions. In the process, Stiles assesses the role of rationality, social relations, identity politics, and other theories of trust to demonstrate that trust is neither essential for cooperation nor a guarantee of protection and safety. Finally, he explores the ethical implications of a foreign policy founded on trust—in particular whether heads of state have the right to enter into open-ended agreements that put their citizens at risk.
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Trust in Schools
A Core Resource for Improvement
Anthony Bryk
Russell Sage Foundation, 2002
Most Americans agree on the necessity of education reform, but there is little consensus about how this goal might be achieved. The rhetoric of standards and vouchers has occupied center stage, polarizing public opinion and affording little room for reflection on the intangible conditions that make for good schools. Trust in Schools engages this debate with a compelling examination of the importance of social relationships in the successful implementation of school reform. Over the course of three years, Bryk and Schneider, together with a diverse team of other researchers and school practitioners, studied reform in twelve Chicago elementary schools. Each school was undergoing extensive reorganization in response to the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988, which called for greater involvement of parents and local community leaders in their neighborhood schools. Drawing on years longitudinal survey and achievement data, as well as in-depth interviews with principals, teachers, parents, and local community leaders, the authors develop a thorough account of how effective social relationships—which they term relational trust—can serve as a prime resource for school improvement. Using case studies of the network of relationships that make up the school community, Bryk and Schneider examine how the myriad social exchanges that make up daily life in a school community generate, or fail to generate, a successful educational environment. The personal dynamics among teachers, students, and their parents, for example, influence whether students regularly attend school and sustain their efforts in the difficult task of learning. In schools characterized by high relational trust, educators were more likely to experiment with new practices and work together with parents to advance improvements. As a result, these schools were also more likely to demonstrate marked gains in student learning. In contrast, schools with weak trust relations saw virtually no improvement in their reading or mathematics scores. Trust in Schools demonstrates convincingly that the quality of social relationships operating in and around schools is central to their functioning, and strongly predicts positive student outcomes. This book offer insights into how trust can be built and sustained in school communities, and identifies some features of public school systems that can impede such development. Bryk and Schneider show how a broad base of trust across a school community can provide a critical resource as education professional and parents embark on major school reforms. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
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Trust in the Land
New Directions in Tribal Conservation
Beth Rose Middleton
University of Arizona Press, 2011
“The Earth says, God has placed me here. The Earth says that God tells me to take care of the Indians on this earth; the Earth says to the Indians that stop on the Earth, feed them right. . . . God says feed the Indians upon the earth.”

—Cayuse Chief Young Chief, Walla Walla Council of 1855

America has always been Indian land. Historically and culturally, Native Americans have had a strong appreciation for the land and what it offers. After continually struggling to hold on to their land and losing millions of acres, Native Americans still have a strong and ongoing relationship to their homelands. The land holds spiritual value and offers a way of life through fishing, farming, and hunting. It remains essential—not only for subsistence but also for cultural continuity—that Native Americans regain rights to land they were promised.

Beth Rose Middleton examines new and innovative ideas concerning Native land conservancies, providing advice on land trusts, collaborations, and conservation groups. Increasingly, tribes are working to protect their access to culturally important lands by collaborating with Native and non- Native conservation movements. By using private conservation partnerships to reacquire lost land, tribes can ensure the health and sustainability of vital natural resources. In particular, tribal governments are using conservation easements and land trusts to reclaim rights to lost acreage. Through the use of these and other private conservation tools, tribes are able to protect or in some cases buy back the land that was never sold but rather was taken from them.

Trust in the Land sets into motion a new wave of ideas concerning land conservation. This informative book will appeal to Native and non-Native individuals and organizations interested in protecting the land as well as environmentalists and government agencies.
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Two Kinds of Rationality
Kibbutz Democracy and Generational Conflict
T.M.S. Evens
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

Two Kinds of Rationality was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Beginning with a discussion of mind-body dualism in social anthropology, Evens presents a profound theory of human conduct that deploys notions of hierarchy and practice. He uses the case study of an Israeli kibbutz to address the central anthropological problem of rationality.

Of particular interest is Evens's interpretation of the Genesis myth, as well as his reading of Rousseau's revision of this myth, as paradigms of generational conflict and the kibbutz's logic of moral order. These interpretations are tied to Evens's detailed discussion of a controversial attempt to introduce secret balloting into a particular kibbutz's directly democratic process.

Two Kinds of Rationality distinguishes between instrumental and mythic rationality, picturing the latter as a value rationality. Projecting reality as basically ambiguous, Evens offers a critique of theoretical approaches to social action and a rethinking of contemporary notions of human agency. This revolutionary theoretical work will appeal to social and political theorists, anthropologists, and students of cultural studies, social movements, and Jewish studies.

T. M. S. Evens is professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of numerous articles and coeditor of Transcendence in Society: Case Studies (1990), a comparative study of social movements.

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The Two Lives of Sally Miller
A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans
Wilson, Carol
Rutgers University Press, 2007

In 1843, the Louisiana Supreme Court heard the case of a slave named Sally Miller, who claimed to have been born a free white person in Germany. Sally, a very light-skinned slave girl working in a New Orleans caf, might not have known she had a case were it not for a woman who recognized her as Salom Muller, with whom she had emigrated from Germany over twenty years earlier. Sally decided to sue for her freedom, and was ultimately freed, despite strong evidence contrary to her claim.

In The Two Lives of Sally Miller, Carol Wilson explores this fascinating legal case and its reflection on broader questions about race, society, and law in the antebellum South. Why did a court system known for its extreme bias against African Americans help to free a woman who was believed by many to be a black slave? Wilson explains that while the notion of white enslavement was shocking, it was easier for society to acknowledge that possibility than the alternative-an African slave who deceived whites and triumphed over the system.

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Two Toms
Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor
Thomas H. Johnson
University of Utah Press, 2011

In 1969, Tom Wesaw was an 83-year-old Shoshone doctor and religious leader on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. He could no longer drive, which posed problems in making house calls. The arrival of young anthropologist Tom Johnson changed that. Johnson would drive Wesaw, and cook, pump water, and build fires for sweat lodges. In exchange, the elder Tom would show the younger Tom his work. The two were together so often that the people of Wind River began to refer to them affectionately by one name: Two Toms. By the light of the lamp Wesaw gave him, Johnson would write down what he learned. The Shoshone doctor wanted his student to share everything he saw and heard. Now, in Two Toms: Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor, he has.

Presented as an engaging narrative, Johnson’s book reveals details about the Shoshone culture and it chronicles the story of the friendship between these two men of different backgrounds. Filled with valuable anthropological information, this book is also highly readable and entertaining.
 
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A Two Way Street
The Institutional Dynamics of the Modern Administrative State
George A. Krause
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999

One of the central questions of political science has been whether politicians control the bureaucracy, or whether the bureaucracy possesses independent authority from democratic institutions of government. Relying on advanced statistical techniques and case studies, George Krause argues instead for a dynamic system of influence—one allowing for two-way interaction among the president, congress, and bureaucratic agencies. Krause argues that politicians and those responsible for implementing policy respond not only to each other, but also to events and conditions within each government institution as well as to the larger policy environment. His analysis and conclusions will challenge conventional theoretical and empirical wisdom in the field of administrative politics and public bureaucracy.

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Typhoid in Uppingham
Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–1877
Nigel Richardson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
After the Public Heath Acts of 1872 and 1875, British local authorities bore statutory obligations to carry out sanitary improvements. Richardson explores public health strategy and central-local government relations during the mid-nineteenth-century, using the experience of Uppingham, England, as a micro-historical case study. Uppingham is a small (and unusually well-documented) market town which contains a boarding school. Despite legal changes enforcing sanitary reform, the town was hit three times by typhoid in 1875–1876.

Richardson examines the conduct of those involved in town and school, the economic dependence of the former on the latter, and the opposition to higher rates to pay for sanitary improvement by a local ratepayer "shopocracy." He compares the sanitary state of the community with others nearby, and Uppingham School with comparable schools of that era. Improvement was often determined by business considerations rather than medical judgments, and local personalities and events frequently drove national policy in practice. This study illuminates wider themes in Victorian public medicine, including the difficulty of diagnosing typhoid before breakthroughs in bacteriological research, the problems local officialdom faced in implementing reform, and the length of time it took London ideas and practice to filter into rural areas.
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