Results by title
52 books match the query 'Idea' and 4 start with c
Capital of Mind
The Idea of a Modern American UniversityAdam R. Nelson
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Capital of Mind is the second volume in a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of American higher education. Picking up from the first volume, Exchange of Ideas, Adam R. Nelson looks at the early decades of the nineteenth century, explaining how the idea of the modern university arose from a set of institutional and ideological reforms designed to foster the mass production and mass consumption of knowledge. This “industrialization of ideas” mirrored the industrialization of the American economy and catered to the demands of a new industrial middle class for practical and professional education. From Harvard in the north to the University of Virginia in the south, new experiments with the idea of a university elicited intense debate about the role of scholarship in national development and international competition, and whether higher education should be supported by public funds, especially in periods of fiscal austerity. The history of capitalism and the history of the university, Nelson reveals, are intimately intertwined—which raises a host of important questions that remain salient today. How do we understand knowledge and education as commercial goods? Should they be public or private? Who should pay for them? And, fundamentally, what is the optimal system of higher education for a capitalist democracy?
Changing Sex
Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of GenderBernice L. Hausman
Duke University Press, 1994
Hausman’s inquiry into the development of endocrinology and plastic surgery shows how advances in medical knowledge were central to the establishment of the material and discursive conditions necessary to produce the demand for sex change—that is, to both "make" and "think" the transsexual. She also retraces the hidden history of the concept of gender, demonstrating that the semantic distinction between "natural" sex and "social" gender has its roots in the development of medical treatment practices for intersexuality—the condition of having physical characteristics of both sexes— in the 1950s. Her research reveals the medical institution’s desire to make heterosexual subjects out of intersexuals and indicates how gender operates semiotically to maintain heterosexuality as the norm of the human body. In critically examining medical discourses, popularizations of medical theories, and transsexual autobiographies, Hausman details the elaboration of "gender narratives" that not only support the emergence of transsexualism, but also regulate the lives of all contemporary Western subjects. Changing Sex will change the ways we think about the relation between sex and gender, the body and sexual identity, and medical technology and the idea of the human.
Coming Together
Singapore and the Idea of the EntrepotJeff Khoo
National University of Singapore Press, 2027
Explores the circumstances and elements that make for a successful Southeast Asian entrepôt.
What made modern Singapore and fifteenth-century Malacca so exceptional in their success in trade, and why did so many other attempts fail to coalesce? Coming Together recasts the founding of modern Singapore as the culmination of a long tradition of alliance-building within the “straits and peninsula,” that sliver of maritime Southeast Asia that connects the Indian Ocean with the China Seas. From abortive Franco-Siamese projects in the 1680s, through lonely failure at Poulo Condor and stubborn frustration on the Burmese “Eastern Coast,” to the persistent enterprise of Bugis and Malay rulers during the 1770s and 1780s, Coming Together follows an evolving cast of princes, captains, merchants, and missionaries drawn together by a powerful idea: that the trade of Asia could be concentrated at a single and wildly prosperous place.
Long-neglected French archival materials illuminate events long distorted by colonial historiography, revealing the entrepôt as a transcultural project sustained by tributary diplomacy, treaty-making, and the pragmatic exchange of protection for commercial privilege. The result is a fundamental reinterpretation of the origins of Penang and Singapore—and of the alliance-building that lies at the core of modern Singapore.
Cultural Literacy and the Idea of General Education
Edited by Ian Westbury and Alan C. Purves
University of Chicago Press, 1987