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Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959)
Fifty Years of American Landscape
Diane Kostial McGuire
Harvard University Press, 1982

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Clear It with Sid!
Sidney R. Yates and Fifty Years of Presidents, Pragmatism, and Public Service
Michael C. Dorf and George Van Dusen
University of Illinois Press, 2022
The son of a Lithuanian blacksmith, Sidney R. Yates rose to the pinnacle of Washington power and influence. As chair of a House Appropriations Subcommittee, Yates was a preeminent national figure involved in issues that ranged from the environment and Native American rights to Israel and support for the arts. Speaker Tip O'Neill relied on the savvy Chicagoan in the trenches and advised anyone with controversial legislation to first "clear it with Sid!"

Michael C. Dorf and George Van Dusen draw on scores of interviews and unprecedented access to private papers to illuminate the life of an Illinois political icon. Wise, energetic, charismatic, petty, stubborn--Sid Yates presented a complicated character to constituents and colleagues alike. Yet his get-it-done approach to legislation allowed him to bridge partisan divides in the often-polarized House of Representatives. Following Yates from the campaign trail to the negotiating table to the House floor, Dorf and Van Dusen offer a rich portrait of a dealmaker extraordinaire and tireless patriot on a fifty-year journey through postwar American politics.
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Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie
Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers
H. Brandt Ayers and Carol Nunnelley
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie: Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers collects in one volume the essential writing of the legendary publisher and editor of the Anniston Star.
 
The decades-long ribbon of prose that spilled from Ayers’s pen captured the epochal milestones of our times, such as the 1965 March on Washington, the civil rights movement, the rise and decay of the New South movement, the South’s transformation from a bulwark of Democratic entropy to a heartland of irascible conservatism, and the election of the republic’s first black president.
 
Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie: Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers includes Ayers’s unforgettable descriptions of the political giants of Alabama’s turbulent twentieth century. Of George Wallace he wrote: “He lost his way in the swamp of racial politics, squandered his great talent for leadership, and, cruelly, has made his most devoted followers bear the consequences.” And Ayers memorably hymned Supreme Court justice Hugo Black as having “made of the Bill of Rights a trumpet which kept calling the nation back to its original purpose.”
 
Ayers was so known for his passionate crusade for a fair deal for “the plain people of both races” of Alabama that enemies dubbed his family’s newspaper “The Red Star.” A loyal son of Alabama who extolls Southern culture, Ayers unapologetically calls for Alabamians to cast off the moribund ideologies of the past. He jousts against obscurantism itself: “When fear and ignorance snuff out the brains of a man,” he thunders, “he is reduced to the level of a jungle predator—a flexed mass of instincts.”
 
Writing from a generous heart, Ayers enlivens and enlightens. Eschewing the hifalutin, his artful writing is both accessible to the people and admired by the learned. Far from provincial, his far-ranging eye landed often on global events, and he persuasively frames the state and region as an active front on which key national issues hang.
 
Ayers ranks among the most prolific and insightful chroniclers of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Alabama. Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie: Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers is a monument to his enduring legacy and relevance.
 
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D. H. Lawrence
Fifty Years on Film
Louis K. Greiff
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Between 1949 and 1999, the life and works of D. H. Lawrence inspired ten feature films: nine based on works of fiction and one based on biography. In D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film, Louis K. Greiff examines these films as adaptations, as cultural or historical documents, and as independent works of art.

Significantly, the films were not spread evenly throughout the decades but appeared in three clusters. The first group, or the “black and white,” appeared between 1949 and 1960. With the exception of Marc Allegret’s L’Amant de Lady Chatterley (1955), all celebrate the British common man as a midcentury hero and promote an unmistakable yet never strident postwar ethos that is Marxist in spirit.

The second cluster occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These films show Lawrence’s values as similar to the cultural values of the time—nonconformity, neobohemianism, sexual rebellion, war protest, and the celebration of youth. In his discussion of the third group Greiff explains why, in an un-Lawrentian decade like the 1980s, there was a revival of Lawrence’s works on film.

Greiff also deals with the contributions made by directors Ken Russell and Christopher Miles, both of whom directed Lawrence films of the latter two clusters. He shows how Russell and, to a lesser extent, Miles were responsible for bringing mass audiences in touch with the works of Lawrence.

Greiff’s final and most important goal is to interpret and evaluate the Lawrence films. He looks first at the film as a visual representation of its text, then as an original act of creation and object of art.

           

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Don't Leave Hungry
Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review
James Smith
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
This substantial anthology charts the development of this influential journal decade by decade, making clear that although it has close ties to a particular region, it has consistently maintained a national scope, publishing poets from all over the United States. SPR’s goal has been to celebrate the poem above all, so although there are poems by major poets here, there are many gems by less famous, perhaps even obscure, writers too. Here are 183 poems by nearly as many poets, from A. R. Ammons, Kathryn Stripling Byer, James Dickey, Mark Doty, Claudia Emerson, David Ignatow, and Carolyn Kizer to Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Howard Nemerov, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, and Charles Wright.
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Dutch is Beautiful
Fifty Years of Dutch and Flemish Studies at the University of Michigan
Ton Broos, Annemarie Toebosch, and Karla Vandersypen
Michigan Publishing Services, 2019

Dutch is Beautiful tells the story of the fifty years of Dutch and Flemish Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. It is an account of the efforts to promote Dutch and Flemish culture and language, as well as a description of how the teaching of Dutch language, literature, history and culture can be a tool to look at a world of diverse identities. It also offers a comprehensive overview of the beginnings of a successful program that included Dutch writers-in-residence, visiting Netherlands professors, cultural and educational events, arts, music, films, conferences and publications. Several alumni of  the program look back at their college years with appreciation. Articles and essays on history, Anne Frank, and conversations on colonialism discuss critical and educational views on Dutch and Flemish Studies in past, present and future, when diversity, equity and inclusion are important goals and objectives, and public scholarship and academic activism will be a larger part of the curriculum. This book will inform, entertain, stimulate and impress everyone who is interested in the culture of the Low Countries. The title says it all!

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Ecology and Management of a Forested Landscape
Fifty Years on the Savannah River Site
Edited by John C. Kilgo and John I. Blake; Foreword by H. Ronald Pulliam
Island Press, 2005

Can land degraded by centuries of agriculture be restored to something approaching its original productivity and diversity? This book tells the story of fifty years of restoration and management of the forested landscape of the Savannah River Site, a 310-square-mile tract of land in the coastal plain of South Carolina that has been closed to the public for more than five decades.

Ecology and Management of a Forested Landscape presents for the first time a complete synthesis and summary of information on the Savannah River Site, providing a detailed portrait of the plant and animal populations and communities on the site and the effects on them of fifty years of management practices. Contributors offer thirty-two chapters that describe the site's history, land management, physical environment, plant and animal communities, endangered species, and game species. Extensively illustrated with photos, maps, charts, and tables, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the forest management practices that can support long-term forest recovery and restoration of native habitats. It represents for natural resource managers a detailed case study in long-term land management, and provides scientists with an in-depth analysis of the natural history and physical and biological characteristics of a southeastern forested landscape.

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Fifty Years of Change on the U.S.-Mexico Border
Growth, Development, and Quality of Life
By Joan B. Anderson and James Gerber
University of Texas Press, 2007

Winner, Book Award, Associaton for Borderland Studies, 2008

The U.S. and Mexican border regions have experienced rapid demographic and economic growth over the last fifty years. In this analysis, Joan Anderson and James Gerber offer a new perspective on the changes and tensions pulling at the border from both sides through a discussion of cross-border economic issues and thorough analytical research that examines not only the dramatic demographic and economic growth of the region, but also shifts in living standards, the changing political climate, and environmental pressures, as well as how these affect the lives of people in the border region.

Creating what they term a Border Human Development Index, the authors rank the quality of life for every U.S. county and Mexican municipio that touches the 2,000-mile border. Using data from six U.S. and Mexican censuses, the book adeptly illustrates disparities in various aspects of economic development between the two countries over the last six decades.

Anderson and Gerber make the material accessible and compelling by drawing an evocative picture of how similar the communities on either side of the border are culturally, yet how divided they are economically. The authors bring a heightened level of insight to border issues not just for academics but also for general readers. The book will be of particular value to individuals interested in how the border between the two countries shapes the debates on quality of life, industrial growth, immigration, cross-border integration, and economic and social development.

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Fifty Years of Economic Measurement
The Jubilee of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth
Edited series contract is 9894 by Ernst R. Berndt and Jack E. Triplett
University of Chicago Press, 1990

This volume contains papers presented at a conference in May 1988 in Washington, D.C., commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW). The call for papers emphasized assessments of broad topics in economic measurement, both conceptual and pragmatic. The organizers desired (and succeeded in obtaining) a mix of papers that, first, illustrate the range of measurement issues that economics as a science must confront and, second, mark major milestones of CRIW accomplishment. The papers concern prices and output (Griliches, Pieper, Triplett) and also the major productive inputs, capital (Hulten) and labor (Hamermesh). Measures of saving, the source of capital accumulation, are covered in one paper (Boskin); measuring productivity, the source of much of the growth in per capita income, is reviewed in another (Jorgenson). The use of economic data in economic policy analysis and in regulation are illustrated in a review of measures of tax burden (Atrostic and Nunns) and in an analysis of the data needed for environmental regulation (Russell and Smith); the adequacy of data for policy analysis is evaluated in a roundtable discussion (chapter 12) involving four distinguished policy analysts with extensive government experience in Washington and Ottawa.

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Fifty Years of "The Battle of Algiers"
Past as Prologue
Sohail Daulatzai
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film that poetically captures Algerian resistance to French colonial occupation, is widely considered one of the greatest political films of all time. With an artistic defiance that matched the boldness of the anticolonial struggles of the time, it was embraced across the political spectrum—from leftist groups like the Black Panther Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization to right-wing juntas in the 1970s and later, the Pentagon in 2003. With a philosophical nod to Frantz Fanon, Sohail Daulatzai demonstrates that tracing the film’s afterlife reveals a larger story about how dreams of freedom were shared and crushed in the fifty years since its release. As the War on Terror expands and the “threat” of the Muslim looms, The Battle of Algiers is more than an artifact of the past—it’s a prophetic testament to the present and a cautionary tale of an imperial future, as perpetual war has been declared on permanent unrest.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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Fifty Years of Thomas Mann Studies
A Bibliography of Criticism
Klaus Jonas
University of Minnesota Press, 1955
Fifty Years of Thomas Mann Studies was first published in 1955. 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.For many years students of Thomas Mann have felt the need for a guide to the vast labyrinth of literature about Mann. This bibliography answers that need, providing a comprehensive survey of the critical and biographical material that has been written in the past half century. Mr. Jonas has based his compilation on his extensive collection of material about Mann, years of research in American libraries, and a worldwide correspondence. Thomas Mann has written a foreword in German.The bibliography lists a total of 3010 books, articles, pamphlets, and unpublished dissertations or studies in progress. They are in 17 different languages, the larges number in English and German. Of the listings, some 2200 are articles from periodicals, newspapers, or yearbooks; about 350 are books that contain some information about Mann and another 90 or so are books or pamphlets devoted exclusively to Mann. The remainder are unpublished works.The entries are arranged according to subject categories, with numerous cross-references. Writings by Mann himself have been included only when they contain self-criticism or autobiographical material that throws light on his though or art. A checklist of Mann’s most important publications in German and English is included. Indexes for both subject and author add to the usefulness of the material.
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A Good Long Drive
Fifty Years of Texas Country Reporter
Bob Phillips
University of Texas Press, 2021

In 2021, Texas Country Reporter celebrates its fiftieth season on the air. Broadcast every week on stations across Texas, it focuses on “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” And at the center of it is Bob Phillips, the show’s creator and host—an erstwhile poor kid from Dallas who ended up with a job that allowed him to rub elbows with sports figures, entertainers, and politicians but who preferred to spend his time on the back roads, listening to less-famous Texans tell their stories.

In this memoir, Phillips tells his own story, from his early days as a reporter and his initial pitch for the show while a student at SMU to his ongoing work at the longest-running independently produced TV show in American television history. As we travel with Phillips on his journey, we meet Willie Nelson and former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry; reflect on memorable, unusual, and challenging show segments; experience the behind-the-scenes drama that goes on in local television; witness the launching of an annual festival; and discover the unbelievable allure of Texas, its culture, and, especially, its people. Spanning generations, A Good Long Drive is proof that life’s journey really is a destination unto itself.

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International and Language Education for a Global Future
Fifty Years of U.S. Title VI and Fulbright-Hays Programs
David S. Wiley
Michigan State University Press, 2010

The contributions to this book address the role that the U.S. Department of Education Title VI and Fulbright-Hays programs have played in building the largest and highest quality infrastructure in the world for training in languages and other aspects of foreign area knowledge. The volume celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Title VI and associated Fulbright-Hays programs, which have established more than 150 centers of excellence for modern foreign language and area studies and international business education in more than 60 U.S. universities.
     The authors review the history of the programs, including their founding and their cumulative impacts on internationalizing the American university at the graduate and undergraduate levels. They review how programs for foreign research, technology for foreign information access, and undergraduate programs have built the foundations of U.S. language-learning materials for use in college courses and government with improved language-learning pedagogies, erected the most distinguished library holdings on foreign countries, supported in-depth research abroad in virtually every nation, and created capacity to teach more than 200 less commonly taught languages.
 

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Is It Still Good to Ya?
Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017
Robert Christgau
Duke University Press, 2018
Is It Still Good to Ya? sums up the career of longtime Village Voice stalwart Robert Christgau, who for half a century has been America's most widely respected rock critic, honoring a music he argues is only more enduring because it's sometimes simple or silly. While compiling historical overviews going back to Dionysus and the gramophone along with artist analyses that range from Louis Armstrong to M.I.A., this definitive collection also explores pop's African roots, response to 9/11, and evolution from the teen music of the '50s to an art form compelled to confront mortality as its heroes pass on. A final section combines searching obituaries of David Bowie, Prince, and Leonard Cohen with awed farewells to Bob Marley and Ornette Coleman.
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Japan in the World, the World in Japan
Fifty Years of Japanese Studies at Michigan
Edited by the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan
University of Michigan Press, 2001
In fall 1997 the Center for Japanese Studies at The University of Michigan celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The November symposium featured more than fifty speakers, moderators, and musicians who celebrated the occasion and offered reminiscences on the Center's multifaceted scholarly and professional missions, discussions of the accomplishments of its al-umni/ae, and perspectives on wartime and postwar Japan-U.S. relations. As the first American interdisciplinary institute devoted to education and research on Japan, The University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies has a path-making legacy. This volume, which includes the public presentations from the November 1997 symposium, reflects that legacy and the university's long and continuing involvement in Asia, which dates back to the 1870s.
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Knowing and Seeing
Reflections on Fifty Years of Drawing Cities
Douglas Cooper
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
In Knowing and Seeing, Douglas Cooper reflects on his long career as a muralist in various cities around the world, including in Pittsburgh. The essays are also personal discussing family, memories from his childhood, mentoring from his Carnegie Mellon University professors, and his collaborations. They are also instructive. Murals are not walls but provide the appearance as such and require the artist to have a different skill set that is part architect, part painter, and part builder.
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Middletown Families
Fifty Years of Change and Continuity
Theodore Caplow, Bruce A. Chadwick, Howard M. Bahr, Reuben Hill, and Margaret Holmes Williamson
University of Minnesota Press, 1985

Middletown Families was first published in 1985. 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.

Fifty years after publication of Robert and Helen Lloyd's classic studies, Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), the Middletown III Project picked up and continued their exploration of American values and institutions. By duplicating the original studies - in many cases by using the same questions - this team of social scientists attempted to gauge the changes that had taken place in Muncie, Indiana, since the 1920s. In Middletown Families, the first book to emerge from this project, Theodore Caplow and his colleagues reveal that many widely discussed changes in family life, such as the breakdown of traditional male/female roles, increased conflict between parents and children, and disintegration of extended family ties, are more perceived than actual. Their evidence suggests that the Middletown family seems to be stronger and more tolerant, with closer bonds and greater marital satisfaction than fifty years ago. Instead of breaking it apart, the pressures of modern society may have drawn the family closer together.

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National Parks Forever
Fifty Years of Fighting and a Case for Independence
Jonathan B. Jarvis and T. Destry Jarvis
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Two leaders of the National Park Service provide a front-row seat to the disastrous impact of partisan politics over the past fifty years—and offer a bold vision for the parks’ future.
 
The US National Parks, what environmentalist and historian Wallace Stegner called America’s “best idea,” are under siege. Since 1972, partisan political appointees in the Department of the Interior have offered two conflicting views of the National Park Service (NPS): one vision emphasizes preservation and science-based decision-making, and another prioritizes economic benefits and privatization. These politically driven shifts represent a pernicious, existential threat to the very future of our parks.
 
For the past fifty years, brothers Jonathan B. and T. Destry Jarvis have worked both within and outside NPS as leaders and advocates. National Parks Forever interweaves their two voices to show how our parks must be protected from those who would open them to economic exploitation, while still allowing generations to explore and learn in them. Their history also details how Congress and administration appointees have used budget and staffing cuts to sabotage NPS’s ability to manage the parks and even threatened their existence. Drawing on their experience, Jarvis and Jarvis make a bold and compelling proposal: that it is time for NPS to be removed from the Department of the Interior and made an independent agency, similar to the Smithsonian Institution, giving NPS leaders the ability to manage park resources and plan our parks’ protection, priorities, and future.
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National Parks Forever
Fifty Years of Fighting and a Case for Independence
Jonathan B. Jarvis and T. Destry Jarvis
University of Chicago Press, 2022

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Two leaders of the National Park Service provide a front-row seat to the disastrous impact of partisan politics over the past fifty years—and offer a bold vision for the parks’ future.
 
The US National Parks, what environmentalist and historian Wallace Stegner called America’s “best idea,” are under siege. Since 1972, partisan political appointees in the Department of the Interior have offered two conflicting views of the National Park Service (NPS): one vision emphasizes preservation and science-based decision-making, and another prioritizes economic benefits and privatization. These politically driven shifts represent a pernicious, existential threat to the very future of our parks.
 
For the past fifty years, brothers Jonathan B. and T. Destry Jarvis have worked both within and outside NPS as leaders and advocates. National Parks Forever interweaves their two voices to show how our parks must be protected from those who would open them to economic exploitation, while still allowing generations to explore and learn in them. Their history also details how Congress and administration appointees have used budget and staffing cuts to sabotage NPS’s ability to manage the parks and even threatened their existence. Drawing on their experience, Jarvis and Jarvis make a bold and compelling proposal: that it is time for NPS to be removed from the Department of the Interior and made an independent agency, similar to the Smithsonian Institution, giving NPS leaders the ability to manage park resources and plan our parks’ protection, priorities, and future.

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The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha
Fifty Years of the Pseudepigrapha Section at the SBL
Matthias Henze
SBL Press, 2019

A history of research that changed scholarly perceptions of early Judaism

This collection of essays by some of the most important scholars in the fields of early Judaism and Christianity celebrates fifty years of the study of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha at the Society of Biblical Literature and the pioneering scholars who introduced the Pseudepigrapha to the Society. Since its early days as a breakfast meeting in 1969, the Pseudepigrapha Section has provided a forum for a rigorous discussion of these understudied texts and their relevance for Judaism and Christianity. Contributors recount the history of the section's beginnings, critically examine the vivid debates that shaped the discipline, and challenge future generations to expand the field in new interdisciplinary directions.

Features:

  • Reflections from early members of the Pseudepigrapha Group
  • Essays that examine a methodological shift from capturing and preserving traditions to exploring the intellectual and social world of Jewish antiquity
  • Evaluations of past interactions with adjacent fields and the larger academic world
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The Postcolonial State in Africa
Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010
Crawford Young
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
In The Postcolonial State in Africa, Crawford Young offers an informed and authoritative comparative overview of fifty years of African independence, drawing on his decades of research and first-hand experience on the African continent.
    Young identifies three cycles of hope and disappointment common to many of the African states (including those in North Africa) over the last half-century: initial euphoria at independence in the 1960s followed by disillusionment with a lapse into single-party autocracies and military rule; a period of renewed confidence, radicalization, and ambitious state expansion in the 1970s preceding state crisis and even failure in the disastrous 1980s; and a phase of reborn optimism during the continental wave of democratization beginning around 1990. He explores in depth the many African civil wars—especially those since 1990—and three key tracks of identity: Africanism, territorial nationalism, and ethnicity.
    Only more recently, Young argues, have the paths of the fifty-three African states begun to diverge more dramatically, with some leading to liberalization and others to political, social, and economic collapse—outcomes impossible to predict at the outset of independence.

“This book is the best volume to date on the politics of the last 50 years of African independence.”—International Affairs

“The book shares Young’s encyclopedic knowledge of African politics, providing in a single volume a comprehensive rendering of the first 50 years of independence. The book is sprinkled with anecdotes from his vast experience in Africa and that of his many students, and quotations from all of the relevant literature published over the past five decades. Students and scholars of African politics alike will benefit immensely from and enjoy reading The Postcolonial State in Africa.”—Political Science Quarterly

“The study of African politics will continue to be enriched if practitioners pay homage to the erudition and the nobility of spirit that has anchored the engagement of this most esteemed doyen of Africanists with the continent.”—African History Review

“The book’s strongest attribute is the careful way that comparative political theory is woven into historical storytelling throughout the text. . . . Written with great clarity even for all its detail, and its interwoven use of theory makes it a great choice for new students of African studies.”—Australasian Review of African Studies
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The Rational Public
Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences
Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro
University of Chicago Press, 1992
This monumental study is a comprehensive critical survey of
the policy preferences of the American public, and will be
the definitive work on American public opinion for some time
to come. Drawing on an enormous body of public opinion data,
Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro provide the richest
available portrait of the political views of Americans, from
the 1930's to 1990. They not only cover all types of
domestic and foreign policy issues, but also consider how
opinions vary by age, gender, race, region, and the like.

The authors unequivocally demonstrate that, notwithstanding fluctuations in the opinions of individuals,
collective public opinion is remarkably coherent: it
reflects a stable system of values shared by the majority of
Americans and it responds sensitively to new events,
arguments, and information reported in the mass media. While
documenting some alarming case of manipulation, Page and
Shapiro solidly establish the soundness and value of
collective political opinion. The Rational Public
provides a wealth of information about what we as a nation
have wanted from government, how we have changed our minds
over the years, and why.

For anyone interested in the short- and long-term trends
in Americans' policy preferences, or eager to learn what
Americans have thought about issues ranging from racial
equality to the MX missile, welfare to abortion, this book
offers by far the most sophisticated and detailed treatment
available.
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Roshara Journal
Chronicling Four Seasons, Fifty Years, and 120 Acres
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016

A photographic diary of a small Midwestern farm and the family who’ve made it their home

In Roshara Journal, father-and-son team Jerry and Steve Apps share the monthly happenings at their family’s farm in central Wisconsin. Featuring Steve’s stunning photos and fifty years of Jerry’s journal entries, Roshara Journal captures the changes—both from month to month and over the decades—on the landscape and farmstead.

The Apps family has owned Roshara since 1966. There they nurture a prairie restoration and pine plantation, maintain a large garden that feeds three generations, observe wildlife species by the dozens, and support a population of endangered butterflies. In documenting life on this piece of land, Jerry and Steve remind us how, despite the pace and challenges of modern life, the seasons continue to influence our lives in ways large and small. Jerry explains that his journal entries become much more than mere observations: "It seems that when I write about something—a bur oak tree, for example—that old tree becomes a part of me. . . . Writing takes me to a place that goes beyond observation and understanding, a place filled with feeling and meaning."

In the tradition of Bernd Heinrich in Maine, Barry Lopez in the Canadian Arctic, and Aldo Leopold just an hour down the road in Baraboo, Jerry and Steve Apps combine observation, experience, and reflection to tell a profound story about one place in the world.

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Through a Green Lens
Fifty Years of Writing for Nature
Robert Michael Pyle
Oregon State University Press, 2016
By an early age, Bob Pyle discovered that he had a greater facility with words than with numbers. In school, he found he could get good grades and win essay contests by relying on those words alone. But he wasn't really moved to write until a powerful experience in the summer he graduated brought his pen together with his passion for the natural world, and his first heartfelt essay came out as a revelation.

Thus began a life path devoted to natural history, nature conservation, and the language, and how they all meet in the literature of the land. Working in a succession of far-flung jobs in biological conservation, teaching, and field research, Pyle eventually threw in a regular paycheck in favor of a freelance existence devoted to his mutual passions for nature study and writing.

All along, he wrote, and wrote: to date, twenty books and hundreds of essays, stories, papers, and poems. But it is the occasional prose--the deeply personal essays that explored and indulged his immediate fascinations--that make up this selection of never-before-collected testimonies. Beginning with that 1965 cri de coeur written on mountain motel stationery, Through a Green Lens  ranges across broad territory of topic, vehicle, geography, populace, and politics, concluding with powerful forewords for two 2015 books, Earth and Eros and Nerves and Numbers.  Pyle's half-century long view, acute and uncommonly attuned to the physical world, gives readers a remarkable window on the natural setting of our life and times.
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Walter's Perspective
A Memoir of Fifty Years in Chicago TV News
Walter Jacobson, Foreword by Bill Kurtis
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

This highly readable book provides a unique glimpse into the rough-and-tumble Chicago news business as seen through the eyes of one of its legendary players. From his first news job working as a legman for Daily News columnist Jack Mabley in the 1950s to his later role as a news anchor and political commentator at CBS-owned WBBM, Walter Jacobson battled along the front lines of an industry undergoing dramatic changes. While it is ultimately Jacobson’s story, a memoir of a long and distinguished (and sometimes highly controversial) career, it is also an insider’s account of the inner workings of Chicago television news, including the ratings games, the process of defining news and choosing stories, the media’s power and its failures, and the meddling by corporate and network executives.

As a reporter, Jacobson was regularly contentious and confrontational. He was fired on a number of occasions and was convicted of libeling tobacco company Brown and Williamson, resulting in a multimillion-dollar federal court judgment against him and CBS. Yet it was this gutsy attitude that put him at the top of the news game. With an engaging writing style, Jacobson recollects his interactions with Chicago mayors Richard J. and Richard M. Daley, Jane Byrne, Harold Washington, and Rahm Emanuel; recounts his coverage of such fascinating news stories as the violent 1968 Democratic National Convention and the execution of convicted mass murderer John Wayne Gacy; and recalls his reporting on and interviews with Louis Farrakhan, governors George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich, and Barack Obama. More than a memoir, Walter’s Perspective is the extraordinary journey of one reporter whose distinctive career followed the changing face of Chicago’s local news.

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