At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to medical breakthroughs and conditioned to assume that, regardless of illnesses, doctors almost certainly will be able to help—not just by diagnosing us and alleviating our pain, but by actually treating or even curing diseases, and significantly improving our lives. 

For most of human history, however, that was far from the case, as veteran medical historian Michael Bliss explains in The Making of Modern Medicine. Focusing on a few key moments in the transformation of medical care, Bliss reveals the way that new discoveries and new approaches led doctors and patients alike to discard fatalism and their traditional religious acceptance of suffering in favor of a new faith in health care and in the capacity of doctors to treat disease. He takes readers in his account to three turning points—a devastating smallpox outbreak in Montreal in 1885, the founding of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School, and the discovery of insulin—and recounts the lives of three crucial figures—researcher Frederick Banting, surgeon Harvey Cushing, and physician William Osler—turning medical history into a fascinating story of dedication and discovery.

Compact and compelling, this searching history vividly depicts and explains the emergence of modern medicine—and, in a provocative epilogue, outlines the paradoxes and confusions underlying our contemporary understanding of disease, death, and life itself. 

The Mine Next Door peels back the veneer of corporate public relations to expose the jagged edges that define the boundaries of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Minnesota’s Iron Range. With five years of ethnographic and archival research, Amy O’Connor was able to interview over seventy people, including miners, retired miners, community members, elected officials, and representatives from Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. In addition to illuminating the everyday lives of Minnesota’s taconite miners and community members, she compares the corporate narratives of CSR with these lived experiences to reveal how CSR boundaries are co-constructed, contested, and consequential. 

In this rare ethnographic account of iron ore mining in the United States, O’Connor shows how turning points—whether macrolevel (e.g., capitalism, governmental policy, and regulation) or microlevel (e.g., miner experiences, local culture, company proclivities)—create CSR communicative practice boundaries that are influenced by culture, history, and geography. The permanence and precariousness of the mining industry offers a unique opportunity to show how corporations, workers, and communities both collaborate and clash. The Mine Next Door argues that to understand CSR communicative practices, we must move beyond the staid, homogeneous CSR reports and glossy public relations documents to reveal the messy and contradictory moments of decision wherein corporations and communities determine where a company has power and responsibility.

Turning Points in Modern Times focuses on events after 1917: the rise of Nazism on the Right and authoritarianism on the Left. Bracher provides an incisive framework for understanding the great ideological confrontation of this century--democracy versus totalitarianism in the forms of fascism, Nazism, and communism. His analysis of the outcomes underscores the significance and power of democratic values and governments.

The doyen of German political history, Karl Dietrich Bracher extends the argument against dictatorship that runs through his life's work, offers a blueprint for dealing with the recent past of the communist East German State (DDR), looks at the true facts of the Stasi collaboration, and challenges misperceptions of Hitler, Stalin, and others. He demonstrates the kinship between fascism and communism, considers Weimar and liberalism, assesses the legacy of Nazism, and outlines the ethos of democracy. In all this Bracher exposes the twentieth-century threats to the democratic state so that they can never again subvert representative government.

A founder of the new history of Germany, which considers the larger context for Hitler and illuminates events through the theories of social science and the values of liberalism and democracy, Bracher writes in the tradition of Acton, Burckhardt, Croce, and Dahrendorf. This is a vital history lesson for our turbulent times, when once more democracy is on the march after a twilight century.