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Adult Abilities
A Study of University Extension Students
Herbert Sorenson
University of Minnesota Press, 1950
Adult Abilities: A Study of University Extension Students was first published in 1950. 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.Adults learn much better than is commonly believed; this is the conclusion reached by Dr. Herbert Sorenson in a nation-wide study of many thousands of adult students in university extension classes. Dr. Sorenson conducted a personal investigation in the state universities of Virginia, California, Kentucky, Colorado, Utah, Indiana, and Minnesota, as well as numerous other schools throughout the country that offer courses for adults. His findings, incorporated in this volume, contribute a substantial body of new data on a subject about which too little has been known heretofore.
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After Rhetoric
The Study of Discourse Beyond Language and Culture
Stephen R. Yarbrough
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Aware that categorical thinking imposes restrictions on the ways we communicate, Stephen R. Yarbrough proposes discourse studies as an alternative to rhetoric and philosophy, both of which are structuralistic systems of inquiry.

Discourse studies, Yarbrough argues, does not support the idea that languages, cultures, or conceptual schemes in general adequately describe linguistic competence. He asserts that a belief in languages and cultures "feeds a false dichotomy: either we share the same codes and conventions, achieving community but risking exclusivism, or we proliferate differences, achieving choice and freedom but risking fragmentation and incoherence." Discourse studies, he demonstrates, works around this dichotomy.

Drawing on philosopher Donald Davidson, Yarbrough establishes the idea that community can be a consequence of communication but is not a prerequisite for it. By disassociating our thinking from conceptual schemes, we can avoid the problems that come with believing in an abstract structure that predates any utterance.

Yarbrough also draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism to define how utterances operate in life and to show how utterances are involved with power and how power relates to understanding. His discussion of Michel Meyer's problematology treats the questions implied by a statement as the meaning of the statement.

Yarbrough introduces readers to a credible theoretical framework for focusing on discourse rather than on conceptual schemes that surround it and to the potential advantages of our using this approach in daily life.

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The Airline Pilots
A Study in Elite Unionization
George E. Hopkins
Harvard University Press, 1971

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The Ait Ndhir of Morocco
A Study of the Social Transformation of a Berber Tribe
Amal Rassam Vinogradov
University of Michigan Press, 1974
This work is an enquiry into the nature of tribalism in Morocco and its historical relationship to the central government. Employing the Air Ndhir as an example, this study attempts to establish a model for the traditional sociopolitical organization of a semi-nomadic Berber tribe of the Middle Atlas and examine the dynamics of the makhzan-tribal symbiosis during the latter half of the 19th century.
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The Alabama Folk Lyric
A Study in Origins and Media of Dissemination
Collected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ray B. Browne
University of Wisconsin Press, 1979

Alabamians have always been a singing people. The settlers who moved into the various sections of the state brought with them songs which reflected their national origins and geographical backgrounds, and as they spread into the hills and over the lowlands they created new songs out of the conditions under which they lived. Also, they absorbed songs from outside sources whenever these pieces could be adapted to their sentiments and ways of life. Thus, by a process of memory, composition and recreation they developed a rich body of folk songs. The following collection a part of the effort to discover and preserve these songs.

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Amasa Mason Lyman, Mormon Apostle and Apostate
A Study in Dedication
Edward Leo Lyman
University of Utah Press, 2009
The early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is filled with fascinating characters, but few led a more tumultuous life than Amasa Lyman. Though he has been largely forgotten, this new biography provides a unique and revealing account of the early days of Mormonism and Lyman’s role in creating that history. He served as a missionary in the “burned-over” district of upstate New York and in Ohio before moving to Kirtland, where he suffered in the infant church’s financial crisis. He participated in the conflicts with hostile Missourians and emigrated to Nauvoo, Illinois. There, he became a leader in the church and a close associate of Joseph Smith. Lyman then led a company of pioneers across Iowa to Winter Quarters and on to the Salt Lake Valley. He was sent to the California gold fields and led the colonization of San Bernardino, where he became its first mayor, before returning to Utah, and he traveled to Europe as head of the church’s European missions.

Having spent more than thirty years in the service of his church, Lyman began to move away from its teachings after a series of conflicts with its second leader, Brigham Young. Lyman was one of the first Mormons to criticize the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which led to his dismissal as an apostle. He was excommunicated in 1870 and became one of the foremost spokesmen of the Godbeite Church of Zion movement before his death in 1877. Author Edward Leo Lyman chronicles Amasa Lyman’s life and interactions with Mormon history with an honesty true to his ancestor’s freethinking spirit.

Winner of the Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Utah History Book Award from the Utah Division of State History. 
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American Congregations, Volume 2
New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations
Edited by James P. Wind and James W. Lewis
University of Chicago Press, 1994
American Congregations, Volume 2: New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations builds upon the empirical foundation provided by the historical studies in volume 1 of the Congregational History Project. Volume 2 addresses three crucial questions: Where is the congregation located on the broader map of American cultural and religious life? What are the distinctive qualities, tasks, and roles of the congregation or parish in American culture? And, what patterns of leadership characterize American congregations?

Published simultaneously, these two volumes combine engaging historical studies with incisive scholarsly analysis to focus attention on the central role of congregational studies in research and teaching of American religion.

"This two volume study of American congregations is of compelling importance to anyone interested in civil society, community, and belief in contemporary America. . . . Extraordinarily rich in detail."—Association for Research on Non-profit Organizations and Voluntary Action News

"[An] informative and stimulating study."—John A. Saliba, Journal of Contemporary Religion

"These congregational histories are important pieces of both social and religious history. They tell us much about the convictions and experience of a great variety of people, different styles of leadership and of how these distinctive local cultures both bear and shape the larger traditions they represent."—Gordon Harland, Studies in Religion

"Both volumes of American Congregations resulted from pioneering efforts, and they are timely and useful. They should force American religious historians to ask new questions. . . . Any American religious historian who fails to take this two-volume work seriously in the future will find his or her own scholarship terribly deficient."—Lewis V. Baldwin, Journal of American History
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American Mediterraneans
A Study in Geography, History, and Race
Susan Gillman
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The story of the “American Mediterranean,” both an idea and a shorthand popularized by geographers, historians, novelists, and travel writers from the early nineteenth century to the 1970s.
 
The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, visiting the Gulf-Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, called it America’s Mediterranean. Almost a century later, Southern California was hailed as “Our Mediterranean, Our Italy!” Although “American Mediterranean” is not a household phrase in the United States today, it once circulated widely in French, Spanish, and English as a term of art and folk idiom. In this book, Susan Gillman asks what cultural work is done by this kind of unsystematic, open-ended comparative thinking.

American Mediterraneans tracks two centuries of this geohistorical concept, from Humboldt in the early 1800s, to writers of the 1890s reflecting on the Pacific world of the California coast, to writers of the 1930s and 40s speculating on the political past and future of the Caribbean. Following the term through its travels across disciplines and borders, American Mediterraneans reveals a little-known racialized history, one that paradoxically appealed to a range of race-neutral ideas and ideals.
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A & P
A Study in Price-Cost Behavior and Public Policy
M. A. Adelman
Harvard University Press

In this study of the A & P. the author inquires into cost and price policy in one of America's large corporations, and examines the fact–finding process in government regulation of an industry.

The first part of the book treats the history of The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company from 1919 to 1951 as a case study of a business management which is seeking to understand its market, formulate a rational price policy, and enforce the policy despite the inarticulate but effective opposition of subordinate executives. The second part deals with the buying methods of the company and A & P's relations with large and small suppliers. Particular attention is given to price discrimination.

In the final part of his study, Mr. Adelman discusses in detail the antitrust suit of the 1940's against the company and the goals and values implicit in that suit. He shows the way in which these goals predetermined the "facts" that purportedly were found. The author shows how a standard inductive–deductive method of economic research would have improved on the process of ”trial by slogan and cliché.“

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The Arabic Language and National Identity
A Study in Ideology
Yasir Suleiman
Georgetown University Press, 2003

Considering the communicative and symbolic roles of language in articulating national identity, Yasir Suleiman provides a fresh perspective on nationalism in the Middle East. The links between language and nationalism are delineated and he demonstrates how this has been articulated over the past two centuries.

Straddling the domains of cultural and political nationalism, Suleiman examines the Arab past (looking at the interpretation and reinvention of tradition, and myth-making); the clash between Arab and Turkish cultural nationalism in the 19th and early 20th century; readings of canonical treatises on the topic of Arab cultural nationalism, the major ideological trends linking language to territorial nationalism; and provides a research agenda for the study of language and nationalism in the Arab context.

This the first full-scale study of this important topic and will be of interest to students of nationalism, Arab and comparative politics, Arabic Studies, history, cultural studies and sociolinguistics.

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Archaeological Concepts for the Study of the Cultural Past
Alan P Sullivan III
University of Utah Press, 2008
One idiosyncrasy of archaeology in North America is that it is considered a sub-field of cultural anthropology. To explore the dimensions of this situation, editor Alan P. Sullivan assembled a group of practicing archaeologists, each with different expertise, to analyze problems with the current disciplinary arrangement and to recommend changes in practice and pedagogy that might coalesce into a truly archaeological study of the cultural past.
By using the theoretical tension that has arisen between archaeology and cultural anthropology, the contributors illustrate the effectiveness of concepts and methods that have little, if any, overlap with those of the mother discipline.
Archaeological Concepts for the Study of the Cultural Past examines the degree to which the historically close relationship between archaeology and cultural anthropology may actually have inhibited archaeological investigations—particularly of those aspects of the cultural past that may be ethnographically undocumented or incompletely described.
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Arms and Men
A Study in American Military History
Millis, Walter
Rutgers University Press, 1981
"A classic..., a brilliant interpretation of the origins of mass warfare. In Arms and Men, Walter Millis has helped to explain not only how war has come to dominate our age, but the often troubled, anomalous relationship between the military and the rest of American society. For everyone, from the beginning student to the advanced scholar, there is not a more comprehensive, more stimulating, or more lively introduction to the men, the ideas, the policies, and the forces that have shaped the development of American military power."
--Richard H. Kohn

"In my opinion Arms and Men is a splendid piece of work, clearly organized, well argued and beautifully written. We have long needed an informed and intelligent commentary on the evolution of American military policy; and in Mr. Millis' book we have it. I think that his book will awaken great interest and be widely used. I am sure also that professional students of the subject will find it possible, after reading this book, to see the course of American military affairs with a new perspective. That is one of the great services performed by Mr. Millis. He has covered the whole subject with authority, but - thank heaven - in a short book, in which the arguments are not blunted by unnecessary detail."
--Gordon A. Craig

"This author knows weapons, politics and human nature. His perceptive grasp of these complexes shines in the writing."
--The New York Times
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Art and Imagination
A Study in the Philosophy of Mind
Roger Scruton
St. Augustine's Press, 2015
This book presents a theory of aesthetic judgment and appreciation in the spirit of modern empiricism. There are three parts: the first deals with questions of philosophical logic, the second with questions in the philosophy of mind, and the third with questions in the philosophy of art. Thus the argument advances from a theory of aesthetic judgment (and in particularly of “aesthetic description”) to a theory of aesthetic appreciation, and thence to an account of the nature and value of art. 
       Scruton examines and rejects various attempts made by recent philosophers to demarcate the realm of aesthetic judgment. He argues that the logic of aesthetic judgment does not suffice to distinguish what is “aesthetic” from what is not, for aesthetic judgments must be explained in terms of the conditions for their acceptance rather than the conditions for their truth. These “acceptance conditions” can be understood only if we first know what is meant by aesthetic experience. This theory attempts to show how aesthetic experience can be regarded as autonomous, even though it is intimately connected with ordinary experience, and is indeed dependent on ordinary experience for its full description.
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