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Twelve inches by twelve inches by twelve inches, the cubic foot is a relatively tiny unit of measure compared to the whole world. With every step, we disturb and move through cubic foot after cubic foot. But behold the cubic foot in nature—from coral reefs to cloud forests to tidal pools—even in that finite space you can see the multitude of creatures that make up a vibrant ecosystem.

For A World in One Cubic Foot, esteemed nature photographer David Liittschwager took a bright green metal cube—measuring precisely one cubic foot—and set it in various ecosystems around the world, from Costa Rica to Central Park. Working with local scientists, he measured what moved through that small space in a period of twenty-four hours. He then photographed the cube’s setting and the plant, animal, and insect life inside it—anything visible to the naked eye. The result is a stunning portrait of the amazing diversity that can be found in ecosystems around the globe. Many organisms captured in Liittschwager’s photographs have rarely, if ever, been presented in their full splendor to the general reader, and the singular beauty of these images evocatively conveys the richness of life around us and the essential need for its conservation. The breathtaking images are accompanied by equally engaging essays that speak to both the landscapes and the worlds contained within them, from distinguished contributors such as Elizabeth Kolbert and Alan Huffman, in addition to an introduction by E. O. Wilson. After encountering this book, you will never look at the tiniest sliver of your own backyard or neighborhood park the same way; instead, you will be stunned by the unexpected variety of species found in an area so small.

 A World in One Cubic Foot puts the world accessibly in our hands and allows us to behold the magic of an ecosystem in miniature. Liittschwager’s awe-inspiring photographs take us to places both familiar and exotic and instill new awareness of the life that abounds all around.

In A World of Becoming William E. Connolly outlines a political philosophy suited to a world whose powers of creative evolution include and exceed the human estate. This is a world composed of multiple interacting systems, including those of climate change, biological evolution, economic practices, and geological formations. Such open systems, set on different temporal registers of stability and instability, periodically resonate together to produce profound, unpredictable changes. To engage such a world reflectively is to feel pressure to alter established practices of politics, ethics, and spirituality. In pursuing such a course, Connolly draws inspiration from philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze, as well as the complexity theorist of biology Stuart Kauffman and the theologian Catherine Keller.

Attunement to a world of becoming, Connolly argues, may help us address dangerous resonances between global finance capital, cross-regional religious resentments, neoconservative ideology, and the 24-hour mass media. Coming to terms with subliminal changes in the contemporary experience of time that challenge traditional images can help us grasp how these movements have arisen and perhaps even inspire creative counter-movements. The book closes with the chapter “The Theorist and the Seer,” in which Connolly draws insights from early Greek ideas of the Seer and a Jerry Lewis film, The Nutty Professor, to inform the theory enterprise today.

“Street gangs mirror the inhuman ambitions and greed of society’s trendsetters and deities even as they fight to the death over scraps from the table of the international drug trade.  But John Hagedorn, characteristically, also finds hope in the contradictory values of outlaw youth—selflessness, solidarity, and love amid cupidity and directionless rage—and he maintains the hope that a culture of resistance will ultimately prevail over the forces of self-destruction. Whether one shares his optimism or not, he makes a compelling case that the future of the world will be determined on the streets of our cities.” —Mike Davis, from the Foreword

“A World of Gangs is an illuminating journey around the cultures, lives, tragedies, and dreams of millions of rebellious youth around the planet. It is an indispensable work to understand the world we live in and essential reading for students of cities and communities.” —Manuel Castells

For the more than a billion people who now live in urban slums, gangs are ubiquitous features of daily life. Though still most closely associated with American cities, gangs are an entrenched, worldwide phenomenon that play a significant role in a wide range of activities, from drug dealing to extortion to religious and political violence. In A World of Gangs, John Hagedorn explores this international proliferation of the urban gang as a consequence of the ravages of globalization.

Looking closely at gang formation in three world cities-Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Capetown-he discovers that some gangs have institutionalized as a strategy to confront a hopeless cycle of poverty, racism, and oppression. In particular, Hagedorn reveals, the nihilistic appeal of gangsta rap and its street ethic of survival “by any means necessary” provides vital insights into the ideology and persistence of gangs around the world. This groundbreaking work concludes on a hopeful note. Proposing ways in which gangs might be encouraged to overcome their violent tendencies, Hagedorn appeals to community leaders to use the urgency, outrage, and resistance common to both gang life and hip-hop in order to bring gangs into broader movements for social justice.

John M. Hagedorn is associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is editor of Gangs in the Global City and author of the highly influential People and Folks: Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City.

MacArthur fellow Mike Davis is the author of many books, including Planet of Slums and, most recently, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb.

Is there anything more American than the ideal of homeownership? In this groundbreaking work of transnational history, Nancy H. Kwak reveals how the concept of homeownership became one of America’s major exports and defining characteristics around the world. In the aftermath of World War II, American advisers urged countries to pursue greater access to homeownership, arguing it would give families a literal stake in their nations, jumpstart a productive home-building industry, fuel economic growth, and raise the standard of living in their countries, helping to ward off the specter of communism.

A World of Homeowners charts the emergence of democratic homeownership in the postwar landscape and booming economy; its evolution as a tool of foreign policy and a vehicle for international investment in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s; and the growth of lower-income homeownership programs in the United States from the 1960s to today. Kwak unravels all these threads, detailing the complex stories and policy struggles that emerged from a particularly American vision for global democracy and capitalism. Ultimately, she argues, the question of who should own homes where—and how—is intertwined with the most difficult questions about economy, government, and society.

A World of Many Worlds is a search into the possibilities that may emerge from conversations between indigenous collectives and the study of science's philosophical production. The contributors explore how divergent knowledges and practices make worlds. They work with difference and sameness, recursion, divergence, political ontology, cosmopolitics, and relations, using them as concepts, methods, and analytics to open up possibilities for a pluriverse: a cosmos composed through divergent political practices that do not need to become the same.

Contributors. Mario Blaser, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Déborah Danowski, Marisol de la Cadena, John Law, Marianne Lien, Isabelle Stengers, Marilyn Strathern, Helen Verran, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Far from being the serene, natural streams of yore, modern rivers have been diverted, dammed, dumped in, and dried up, all in efforts to harness their power for human needs. But these rivers have also undergone environmental change. The old adage says you can’t step in the same river twice, and Ellen Wohl would agree—natural and synthetic change are so rapid on the world’s great waterways that rivers are transforming and disappearing right before our eyes.

            A World of Rivers explores the confluence of human and environmental change on ten of the great rivers of the world. Ranging from the Murray-Darling in Australia and the Yellow River in China to Central Europe’s Danube and the United States’ Mississippi, the book journeys down the most important rivers in all corners of the globe. Wohl shows us how pollution, such as in the Ganges and in the Ob of Siberia, has affected biodiversity in the water. But rivers are also resilient, and Wohl stresses the importance of conservation and restoration to help reverse the effects of human carelessness and hubris.

            What all these diverse rivers share is a critical role in shaping surrounding landscapes and biological communities, and Wohl’s book ultimately makes a strong case for the need to steward positive change in the world’s great rivers.

A World of Words offers a new look at the degree to which language itself is a topic of Poe's texts. Stressing the ways his fiction reflects on the nature of its own signifying practices, Williams sheds new light on such issues as Poe's characterization of the relationship between author and reader as a struggle for authority, on his awareness of the displacement of an "authorial writing self" by a "self as it is written," and on his debunking of the redemptive properties of the romantic symbol.

The abolition of the slave trade is normally understood to be the singular achievement of eighteenth-century British liberalism. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic expands both the temporal and the geographic framework in which the history of abolitionism is conceived. Abolitionism was a theater in which a variety of actors—slaves, African rulers, Caribbean planters, working-class radicals, British evangelicals, African political entrepreneurs—played a part. The Atlantic was an echo chamber, in which abolitionist symbols, ideas, and evidence were generated from a variety of vantage points. These essays highlight the range of political and moral projects in which the advocates of abolitionism were engaged, and in so doing it joins together geographies that are normally studied in isolation.

Where empires are often understood to involve the government of one people over another, Abolitionism and Imperialism shows that British values were formed, debated, and remade in the space of empire. Africans were not simply objects of British liberals’ benevolence. They played an active role in shaping, and extending, the values that Britain now regards as part of its national character. This book is therefore a contribution to the larger scholarship about the nature of modern empires.

Contributors: Christopher Leslie Brown, Seymour Drescher, Jonathon Glassman, Boyd Hilton, Robin Law, Phillip D. Morgan, Derek R. Peterson, John K. Thornton

Anthropologists training to do fieldwork in far-off, unfamiliar places prepare for significant challenges with regard to language, customs, and other cultural differences. However, like other travelers to unknown places, they are often unprepared to deal with the most basic and necessary requirement: food. Although there are many books on the anthropology of food, Adventures in Eating is the first intended to prepare students for the uncomfortable dining situations they may encounter over the course of their careers.

Whether sago grubs, jungle rats, termites, or the pungent durian fruit are on the table, participating in the act of sharing food can establish relationships vital to anthropologists' research practices and knowledge of their host cultures. Using their own experiences with unfamiliar-and sometimes unappealing-food practices and customs, the contributors explore such eating moments and how these moments can produce new understandings of culture and the meaning of food beyond the immediate experience of eating it. They also address how personal eating experiences and culinary dilemmas can shape the data and methodologies of the discipline.

The main readership of Adventures in Eating will be students in anthropology and other scholars, but the explosion of food media gives the book additional appeal for fans of No Reservations and Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel.

From the first vistas provided by flight in balloons in the eighteenth century to the most recent sensing operations performed by military drones, the history of aerial imagery has marked the transformation of how people perceived their world, better understood their past, and imagined their future. In Aerial Aftermaths Caren Kaplan traces this cultural history, showing how aerial views operate as a form of world-making tied to the times and places of war. Kaplan’s investigation of the aerial arts of war—painting, photography, and digital imaging—range from England's surveys of Scotland following the defeat of the 1746 Jacobite rebellion and early twentieth-century photographic mapping of Iraq to images taken in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Throughout, Kaplan foregrounds aerial imagery's importance to modern visual culture and its ability to enforce colonial power, demonstrating both the destructive force and the potential for political connection that come with viewing from above.

 Anthropologists usually think of domesticity as the activities related to the home and the family. Such activities have complex meanings associated with the sense of space, work, gender, and power. The contributors to this interdisciplinary collection of papers examine how indigenous African notions of domesticity interact with Western notions to transform the meaning of such activities. They explore the interactions of notions of domesticity in a number of settings in the twentieth century and the kinds of personal troubles and public issues these interactions have provoked. They also demonstrate that domesticity, as it emerged in Africa through the colonial encounter, was culturally constructed, and they show how ideologies of work, space, and gender interact with broader political-economic processes.

In her introduction, Hansen explains how the meaning of domesticity has changed and been contested in the West, specifies which of these shifting meanings are relevant in the African context, and summarizes the historical processes that have affected African ideologies of domesticity.

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Robert Mugabe, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2 complements courses in history and political science and is an informative collection for general readers.

Amílcar Cabral: A Nationalist and Pan-Africanist Revolutionary, by Peter Karibe Mendy
Amílcar Cabral’s charismatic and visionary leadership, his pan-Africanist solidarity and internationalist commitment to “every just cause in the world,” remain relevant to contemporary struggles for emancipation and self-determination. This concise biography is an ideal introduction to his life and legacy.

Mozambique’s Samora Machel: A Life Cut Short, by Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman
From his anti-colonial military leadership to the presidency of independent Mozambique, Samora Machel held a reputation as a revolutionary hero to the oppressed. Although killed in a 1987 plane crash, for many Mozambicans his memory lives on as a beacon of hope for the future.

Robert Mugabe, by Sue Onslow and Martin Plaut
For some, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was a liberation hero who confronted white rule and oversaw the radical redistribution of land. For others, he was a murderous dictator who drove his country to poverty. This concise biography reveals the complexity of the man who led Zimbabwe for its first decades of independence.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, by Pamela Scully
Nobel Peace Prize–winner and two-time Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf speaks to many of the key themes of the twenty-first century. Among these are the growing power of women in the arenas of international politics and human rights; the ravaging civil wars of the post–Cold War era in which sexual violence is used as a weapon; and the challenges of transitional justice in building postconflict societies.

From a variety of historically grounded perspectives, After the Imperial Turn assesses the fate of the nation as a subject of disciplinary inquiry. In light of the turn toward scholarship focused on imperialism and postcolonialism, this provocative collection investigates whether the nation remains central, adequate, or even possible as an analytical category for studying history. These twenty essays, primarily by historians, exemplify cultural approaches to histories of nationalism and imperialism even as they critically examine the implications of such approaches.
While most of the contributors discuss British imperialism and its repercussions, the volume also includes, as counterpoints, essays on the history and historiography of France, Germany, Spain, and the United States. Whether looking at the history of the passport or the teaching of history from a postnational perspective, this collection explores such vexed issues as how historians might resist the seduction of national narratives, what—if anything—might replace the nation’s hegemony, and how even history-writing that interrogates the idea of the nation remains ideologically and methodologically indebted to national narratives. Placing nation-based studies in international and interdisciplinary contexts, After the Imperial Turn points toward ways of writing history and analyzing culture attentive both to the inadequacies and endurance of the nation as an organizing rubric.

Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Augusto Espiritu, Karen Fang, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Robert Gregg, Terri Hasseler, Clement Hawes, Douglas M. Haynes, Kristin Hoganson, Paula Krebs, Lara Kriegel, Radhika Viyas Mongia, Susan Pennybacker, John Plotz, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Heather Streets, Hsu-Ming Teo, Stuart Ward, Lora Wildenthal, Gary Wilder

Agency in African History is the first edited volume of African history to offer sustained engagement with the idea of agency. Agency is ubiquitous and invisible, contested and yet foundational to the field. These contradictory qualities contribute to the polarization of the term and a stalemate in debates surrounding its use. This volume proposes a way forward by breaking agency down into parts, disaggregating the terms and concepts often associated with agency, and reckoning with historians’ uses and misuses of the term. The book explores how agency has shaped the field of African history and the historical discipline more broadly. Tracing the concept back to the contributions of Black abolitionists and intellectuals in the eighteenth century, the volume challenges popular genealogies of agency in Western academe. Simultaneously, it suggests productive future possibilities for the framework.

The volume contributes to lively debates on the concept of agency in adjoining fields. Recent works in cultural theory, including Naminata Diabate’s Naked Agency (Duke University Press, 2020) and Olúf?´mi Táíwò’s Against Decolonisation (Hurst, 2022), have reinvigorated discussions within African studies about the applicability of agency. In the broader historical discipline, special issues of the Journal of Social History and the American Historical Review (both 2023) have centered on the problems and promises of agency as a historiographical framework, mostly from a Euro-American perspective. This volume makes an urgent intervention in these important conversations, arguing that historians of Africa must both adapt to new scholarly insights and contribute their unique perspectives from a field typically ignored in the formulation of world-historical concepts.

Agency in African History is addressed to historians of Africa and to a broader interdisciplinary audience interested in agency. This interdisciplinary audience includes scholars of African studies—cultural theorists, political scientists, anthropologists, and others—as well as historians of world regions beyond Africa. Individual contributions cover the seventeenth century to the present day and range in subject matter from histories of decolonization and international relations to the Atlantic slave trade, art history, urban studies, sports studies, and cultural theory.

Contributors

Mathew Ayodele
Felicitas Becker
Emily S. Burrill
Robin P. Chapdelaine
Kate Cowcher
Naminata Diabate
Walter Hawthorne
Lauren V. Jarvis
Rachel M. Petrocelli
Ian Read
Jodie Yuzhou Sun
Wallace Teska
Chepchirchir Tirop

The early 1960s are remembered for the emergence of new radical movements influenced by the Cuban Revolution. One such protest movement rose in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. With large timber companies moving in on the forested sierra highlands, campesinos and rancheros did not sit by as their lands and livelihoods were threatened. Continuing a long history of agrarian movements and local traditions of armed self-defense, they organized and demanded agrarian rights.

Thousands of students joined the campesino protests in long-distance marches, land invasions, and direct actions that transcended political parties and marked the participants’ emergence as political subjects. The Popular Guerrilla Group (GPG) took shape from sporadic armed conflicts in the sierra. Early victories in the field encouraged the GPG to pursue more ambitious targets, and on September 23, 1965, armed farmers, agricultural workers, students, and teachers attacked an army base in Madera, Chihuahua. This bold move had deadly consequences.

With a sympathetic yet critical eye, historian Elizabeth Henson argues that the assault undermined and divided the movement that had been in its cradle, sacrificing the most militant, audacious, and serious of a generation at a time when such sacrifices were more frequently observed. Henson shows how local history merged with national tensions over one-party rule, the unrealized promises of the Mexican Revolution, and international ideologies.

In 1972, a young graduate student named Shirley Strum traveled to Kenya to study a troop of olive baboons (Papio anubis) nicknamed the Pumphouse Gang. Like our own ancestors, baboons had adapted to life on the African savannah, and Strum hoped that by observing baboon behavior, she could learn something about how early humans might have lived. Soon the baboons had won her heart as well as her mind, and Strum has been working with them ever since.

Vividly written and filled with fascinating insights, Almost Human chronicles the first fifteen years of Strum's fieldwork with the Pumphouse Gang. From the first paragraph, the reader is drawn along with Strum into the world of the baboons, learning about the tragedies and triumphs of their daily lives—and the lives of the scientists studying them. This edition includes a new introduction and epilogue that place Strum's research in the context of the current global conservation crisis and tell us what has happened to the Pumphouse Gang since the book was first published.

A bullet misses its target in Sarajevo, a would-be Austrian painter gets into the Viennese academy, Lord Halifax becomes British prime minister in 1940 instead of Churchill: seemingly minor twists of fate on which world-shaking events might have hinged. Alternative history has long been the stuff of parlor games, war-gaming, and science fiction, but over the past few decades it has become a popular stomping ground for serious historians. The historian Richard J. Evans now turns a critical, slightly jaundiced eye on a subject typically the purview of armchair historians. The book’s main concern is examining the intellectual fallout from historical counterfactuals, which the author defines as “alternative versions of the past in which one alteration in the timeline leads to a different outcome from the one we know actually occurred.” What if Britain had stood at the sidelines during the First World War? What if the Wehrmacht had taken Moscow? The author offers an engaging and insightful introduction to the genre, while discussing the reasons for its revival in popularity, the role of historical determinism, and the often hidden agendas of the counterfactual historian. Most important, Evans takes counterfactual history seriously, looking at the insights, pitfalls, and intellectual implications of changing one thread in the weave of history. A wonderful critical introduction to an often-overlooked genre for scholars and casual readers of history alike.

Compelling narratives are integral to successful foreign policy, military strategy, and international relations. Yet often narrative is conceived so broadly it can be hard to identify. The formation of strategic narratives is informed by the stories governments think their people tell, rather than those they actually tell. This book examines the stories told by a broad cross-section of British society about their country’s past, present, and future role in war, using in-depth interviews with 67 diverse citizens. It brings to the fore the voices of ordinary people in ways typically absent in public opinion research.
 
Always at War complements a significant body of quantitative research into British attitudes to war, and presents an alternative case in a field dominated by US public opinion research. Rather than perceiving distinct periods between war and peace, British citizens see their nation as so frequently involved in conflict that they consider the country to be continuously at war. At present, public opinion appears to be a stronger constraint on Western defense policy than ever.


 

Recognizing the urgent need for students to understand the emergence of the United States' power and prestige in relation to world events, Gary W. Reichard and Ted Dickson reframe the teaching of American history in a global context. Each essay covers a specific chronological period and approaches fundamental topics and events in United States history from an international perspective, emphasizing how the development of the United States has always depended on its transactions with other nations for commodities, cultural values, and populations. For each historical period, the authors also provide practical guidance on bringing this international approach to the classroom, with suggested lesson plans and activities. Ranging from the colonial period to the civil rights era and everywhere in between, this collection will help prepare Americans for success in an era of global competition and collaboration.

Contributors are David Armitage, Stephen Aron, Edward L. Ayers, Thomas Bender, Stuart M. Blumin, J. D. Bowers, Orville Vernon Burton, Lawrence Charap, Jonathan Chu, Kathleen Dalton, Betty A. Dessants, Ted Dickson, Kevin Gaines, Fred Jordan, Melvyn P. Leffler, Louisa Bond Moffitt, Philip D. Morgan, Mark A. Noll, Gary W. Reichard, Daniel T. Rodgers, Leila J. Rupp, Brenda Santos, Gloria Sesso, Carole Shammas, Suzanne M. Sinke, Omar Valerio-Jimenez, Penny M. Von Eschen, Patrick Wolfe, and Pingchao Zhu.

When the United States took control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Spanish-American War, it declared that it would transform its new colonies through lessons in self-government and the ways of American-style democracy. In both territories, U.S. colonial officials built extensive public school systems, and they set up American-style elections and governmental institutions. The officials aimed their lessons in democratic government at the political elite: the relatively small class of the wealthy, educated, and politically powerful within each colony. While they retained ultimate control for themselves, the Americans let the elite vote, hold local office, and formulate legislation in national assemblies.

American Empire and the Politics of Meaning is an examination of how these efforts to provide the elite of Puerto Rico and the Philippines a practical education in self-government played out on the ground in the early years of American colonial rule, from 1898 until 1912. It is the first systematic comparative analysis of these early exercises in American imperial power. The sociologist Julian Go unravels how American authorities used “culture” as both a tool and a target of rule, and how the Puerto Rican and Philippine elite received, creatively engaged, and sometimes silently subverted the Americans’ ostensibly benign intentions. Rather than finding that the attempt to transplant American-style democracy led to incommensurable “culture clashes,” Go assesses complex processes of cultural accommodation and transformation. By combining rich historical detail with broader theories of meaning, culture, and colonialism, he provides an innovative study of the hidden intersections of political power and cultural meaning-making in America’s earliest overseas empire.

The Spanish Civil War created a conflict for Americans who preferred that the United States remain uninvolved in foreign affairs. Despite the country's isolationist tendencies, opposition to the rise of fascism across Europe convinced many Americans that they had to act in support of the Spanish Republic. While much has been written about the war itself and its international volunteers, little attention has been paid to those who coordinated these relief efforts at home.

American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War tells the story of the political campaigns to raise aid for the Spanish Republic as activists pushed the limits of isolationist thinking. Those concerned with Spain’s fate held a range of political convictions (including anarchists, socialists, liberals, and communists) with very different understandings of what fascism was. Yet they all agreed that fascism’s advance must be halted. With labor strikes, fund-raising parties, and ambulance tours, defenders of Spain in the United States sought to shift the political discussion away from isolation of Spain’s elected government and toward active assistance for the faltering Republic.

Examining the American political organizations affiliated with this relief effort and the political repression that resulted as many of Spain’s supporters faced the early incarnations of McCarthyism’s trials, Smith provides new understanding of American politics during the crucial years leading up to World War II. By also focusing on the impact the Spanish Civil War had on those of Spanish ethnicity in the United States, Smith shows how close to home the seemingly distant war really hit.

American-Australian Relations was first published in 1947. 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.

This new study fills a wide gap in the story of American-Australian relations and is a timely addition to the literature in this field. There has been no comprehensive treatment of the topic before, and it will be of interest to those seeking information that the thorough documentation includes wide use of reports of the American consuls in Australia, and material from Australian parliamentary debates and Australian and American newspapers.

Australia has emerged from the war as an important world power that demands a prominent role in the south and southwest Pacific. At the same time the United States has become more and more deeply involved in Far Eastern affairs. The book gives the background of the development and shows the gradual enlargement of spheres of mutual interest between the two countries, both political and economic, from the end of the eighteenth century down to the problems presented by postwar developments in the Pacific.

Emphasis is placed on the economic and political ambitions of the two countries, and on their resulting agreements and disagreements both in their direct relations and in their relations with the whole Far Eastern region. Dr. Levi points out that the new importance of the Pacific resulting from World War II has proved to both nations their mutual dependence, but at the same time has increased their national interest in ever-widening and overlapping spheres in the Pacific area.

Fritzsch offers readers the opportunity to listen in on a meeting of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and a present-day physicist. While he introduces the theory of relativity, Fritzsch teaches its sources, its workings, and the ways it has revolutionized our view of the physical world. An Equation That Changed the World dramatizes the importance of relativity, for the human race, and the survival of our planet.

"Fritzsch could not give the modern reader a more memorable introduction to the personalities and science of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein unless somehow he could find the keys to H. G. Wells' time machine. . . . Many readers will applaud Fritzsch for this lively but profoundly insightful book." —Booklist, starred review

"[Fritzsch] has dreamed up a dialogue between the two great physicists, helped along by a fictional modern physicist. . . . The conversation builds up to an explanation of E=mc2, and on the way illuminates the important points where Newtonian and Einsteinian theory diverge." —David Lindley, New York Times Book Review

Anatomy of a Civil War demonstrates the destructive nature of war, ranging from the physical to the psychosocial, as well as war’s detrimental effects on the environment. Despite such horrific aspects, evidence suggests that civil war is likely to generate multilayered outcomes. To examine the transformative aspects of civil war, Mehmet Gurses draws on an original survey conducted in Turkey, where a Kurdish armed group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been waging an intermittent insurgency for Kurdish self-rule since 1984. Findings from a probability sample of 2,100 individuals randomly selected from three major Kurdish-populated provinces in the eastern part of Turkey, coupled with insights from face-to-face in-depth interviews with dozens of individuals affected by violence, provide evidence for the multifaceted nature of exposure to violence during civil war. Just as the destructive nature of war manifests itself in various forms and shapes, wartime experiences can engender positive attitudes toward women, create a culture of political activism, and develop secular values at the individual level. In addition, wartime experiences seem to robustly predict greater support for political activism. Nonetheless, changes in gender relations and the rise of a secular political culture appear to be primarily shaped by wartime experiences interacting with insurgent ideology.

In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.”

In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.

Among the most thoughtful students of the ancient world, Georg Luck has offered subtle and nuanced interpretations of a broad range of classical subjects. Ancient Pathways, Hidden Pursuits brings together the best of Georg Luck's many papers and articles on Graeco-Roman life and thought in the realm of religious beliefs, occult practices, psychology, and morals. The collection complements Luck's Arcana Mundi, an introduction to magic and the occult in antiquity, which has been published in several languages.
The present volume includes the author's thoughts on Greek and Roman religions, early Christianity, Greek and Roman psychology and morals, and magic and the occult. Luck's main findings explore generally neglected areas of ancient civilization, locating magic and philosophy with religion as vehicles for moral and psychological guidance. Throughout this study, one finds meaning in "superstitious" and conflicting patterns of behavior and learns much about the nature of the human soul. This collection will serve as a valuable reference for those interested in the driving motivations of ancient man.
"The topics of the individual articles in this volume are very central and of great humanistic appeal, and they indeed form a thematic unity concerning man and religion in Greek and Roman society." --Ludwig Koenen, Herbert C. Youtie Distinguished University Professor of Papyrology, University of Michigan
Georg Luck is Professor of Classics, emeritus, The Johns Hopkins University.