At the center of what was once the tallgrass prairie, Iowa has stood out for clearing the land and becoming one of the most productive agricultural states in the nation. But its success is challenged by multiple issues including but not limited to a decline in union representation of meatpacking workers; lack of demographic diversity; the advent of job-replacing mechanization; growing income inequality; negative contributions to and effects of climate change and environmental hazards.

To become green, fair, and prosperous, Connerly argues that Iowa must reckon with its past and the fact that its farm economy continues to pollute waterways, while remaining utterly unprepared for climate change. Iowa must recognize ways in which it can bolster its residents’ standard of living and move away from its demographic tradition of whiteness. For development to be sustainable, society must balance it with environmental protection and social justice. Connerly provides a crucial roadmap for how Iowans can move forward and achieve this balance.

In 2002, nuclear-armed adversaries India and Pakistan mobilized for war over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir, sparking panic around the world. Drawing on extensive firsthand experience in the contested region, Sumantra Bose reveals how the conflict became a grave threat to South Asia and the world and suggests feasible steps toward peace.

Though the roots of conflict lie in the end of empire and the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the contemporary problem owes more to subsequent developments, particularly the severe authoritarianism of Indian rule. Deadly dimensions have been added since 1990 with the rise of a Kashmiri independence movement and guerrilla war waged by Islamist groups. Bose explains the intricate mix of regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and caste communities that populate Kashmir, and emphasizes that a viable framework for peace must take into account the sovereignty concerns of India and Pakistan and popular aspirations to self-rule as well as conflicting loyalties within Kashmir. He calls for the establishment of inclusive, representative political structures in Indian Kashmir, and cross-border links between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir. Bose also invokes compelling comparisons to other cases, particularly the peace-building framework in Northern Ireland, which offers important lessons for a settlement in Kashmir.

The Western world has not fully appreciated the desperate tragedy of Kashmir: between 1989 and 2003 violence claimed up to 80,000 lives. Informative, balanced, and accessible, Kashmir is vital reading for anyone wishing to understand one of the world's most dangerous conflicts.

A bountiful resource on history and practice, Living Ethnomusicology is an enlightening intellectual exploration of an exotic academic culture.

Who would have thought that Joycelyn Elders, born into a family that chopped cotton and trapped raccoons to survive, would grow up to be Surgeon General of the United States? Or that Clarence Thomas, brought up by his barely literate grandfather, would someday be a Justice of the Supreme Court? Certainly not statisticians, who tell us that impoverished backgrounds are fairly accurate predictors of impoverished futures. This book seeks out the stories behind the exceptions: those who, against all odds, have made the American myth of rags-to-riches a reality.

For more than ten years Charles Harrington and Susan Boardman explored the life histories of successful Americans forty to fifty-five years old--those from poor homes, whose parents had not completed high school, and those from the middle class. Comparing the routes to success of these two groups--the one by various courses of their own construction, the other by a well-laid path--the authors are able to show where their efforts and qualities diverge, and where they coincide.

Joycelyn Elders and Clarence Thomas are examples of the "pathmakers" of this work. While Paths to Success reveals certain consistencies between these pathmakers' approaches and those of their middle-class counterparts, it also exposes striking differences between men and women, blacks and whites. These differences, fully described here, illuminate the ways in which opportunities, serendipities, and impediments intersect with personal resources, strategies, and choices to produce success where we least expect it.

"Modernity" was an inescapable fact of life for the first generation to come of age in the German Empire. Even the most extreme political opponents saw the chaotic transformation of all spheres of life in the wake of industrial capitalism as the central problem facing young men and women at the fin de siècle. This fresh look at Wilhelmine perceptions of modernity challenges both the traditional emphasis on anti-modernism as a peculiarly German response that led to the rise of National Socialism, and the more recent post-Foucauldian studies on the "pathologies of modernity," which point instead to an unreflective faith in science and efficiency on the part of German progressives. Shifting the focus away from radical extremes on either side, Kevin Repp explores the more moderate agendas of hundreds of mainstream intellectuals and activists from diverse social backgrounds who sought to surmount the human costs of industrialization without relinquishing its positive potential.

Repp combines detailed case studies of Adolf Damaschke, Gertrud Bäumer, and Werner Sombart with an innovative prosopography of their milieu to show how leading reformers enlisted familiar tropes of popular nationalism, eugenics, and cultural pessimism in formulating pragmatic solutions that would be at once modern and humane. Easily obscured by radical voices on right and left, this quiet search for alternatives nevertheless succeeded in building a nationwide network of educational centers, associative ties, and institutions that substantially altered the landscape of Wilhelmine political culture in the decades before the First World War.