Results by title

In the ever-evolving landscape of engineering education, calculus stands as a foundational pillar, yet its teaching methods have remained largely unchanged for decades. This textbook is born out of a deep-seated need for reform. Traditional calculus courses struggle to incorporate relevant, real-world examples. The disconnect between mathematical theory and its real-world uses hinders the learning process and fails to fully engage students in the practical applications of calculus. A second core issue lies not in the examples used but in the selection of material and the overemphasis on lengthy, manual calculations that lack meaningful context. This book represents a radical departure from conventional approaches, inspired by Prof. Grizzle’s experience developing and teaching the first-semester course ROB 101 Computational Linear Algebra. Its goal is to breathe life into mathematics through programming and realistic examples. It begins by placing integration at the beginning of the learning process, starting with sums and progressing to integration, which is not only more intuitive but also lends itself well to programming applications, such as calculating the change in position of mobile robots from velocity curves. Following integration, the book delves into differentiation (both single-variable and multivariable) and its myriad applications. Traditional methods of computing integrals, such as antiderivatives and substitution methods, are then introduced and framed within the context of both manual calculations and modern symbolic tools. The journey continues through improper integrals, ordinary differential equations (ODEs), Laplace Transforms, and Feedback Control, encompassing a breadth of topics rarely seen in a single calculus course.  

An Escaped Slave who Fought for the Union and Whose Wartime Heroism was Finally Recognized with the Nation's Highest Honor for Military Valor

In 1862, Andrew “Andy” Jackson Smith, son of a white landowner and enslaved woman, es­caped to Union troops operating in Kentucky, made his way to the North, and volunteered for the 55th Massachusetts, one of the newly formed African American regiments. The regiment was deployed to South Carolina, and during a desperate assault on a Confederate battery, the color bearer was killed. Before the flag was lost, Smith quickly retrieved it and under heavy fire held the colors steady while the decimated regiment withdrew. The regiment’s commanding officer pro­moted Smith to color sergeant and wrote him a commendation for both saving the regimental flag and bravery under fire. Honorably discharged, Smith returned to Kentucky, where over the course of the next forty years he invested in land. In the early twentieth century, Burt G. Wilder, medical officer of the 55th, contacted Smith about his experiences for a book he was writing. During their correspondence, Wilder realized Smith was eligible for the nation’s highest award. In 1916, Wilder applied to the army, but his request for Smith’s medal was denied due to the “absence of records.” At Smith’s death in 1932, his daughter Caruth received a box of his papers revealing the extent of her father’s heroism. Her nephew took up the cause and through long and painstaking research located the lost records. With the help of historians, local politicians, and others, Andrew Jackson Smith received his long overdue Medal of Honor in 2001.

In Carrying the Colors: The Life and Legacy of Medal of Honor Recipient Andrew Jackson Smith, the riveting journey from slavery to a White House ceremony is revealed, with the indomitable spirit of Smith—slave, soldier, landowner, father—mirrored by the dogged pursuit of his grandson and his allies in the quest to discover the truth about an American who dedicated his life to the service of his community and country.

The only book-length biography of this controversial critic, now in paperback for the first time!

Love him or hate him, admire him or revile him, there is no doubt that Clement Greenberg was the most influential critic of modern art in the second half of the twentieth century. His championing of abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and David Smith put the United States on the international art map. His support for color-field painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland dramatically accelerated their careers. The intellectual power of his polemical essays helped bring about the midcentury shift in which New York replaced Paris as the art capital of the Western world; his aggressive personality and fierce involvement in the New York art scene triggered a backlash so potent that one critic termed it a “patricide.”

An original reflection on Italy’s postwar boom considers potentials for resistance in today’s neoliberal (dis)order

What can 1960s Italian cinema teach us about how to live and work today? Clocking Out challenges readers to think about labor, cinema, and machines as they are intertwined in complex ways in Italian cinema of the early ’60s. Drawing on critical theory and archival research, this book asks what kinds of fractures we might exploit for living otherwise, for resisting traditional narratives, and for anticapitalism. 

Italy in the 1960s was a place where the mass-producing factory was the primary mode of understanding what it meant to work, but it was also a time when things might have gone another way. This thinking and living differently appears in the cracks, lapses, or moments of film. Clocking Out is organized into scenes from an obscure 1962 Italian comedy (Renzo e Luciana, from Boccaccio 70). Reconsidering the origins of paradigms such as clocking in and out, “society is a factory,” and the gendered division of labor, Karen Pinkus challenges readers to think through cinema, enabling us to see gaps and breakdowns in the postwar order. She focuses on the Olivetti typewriter company and a little-known film from an Italian anthology movie, thinking with cinema about the power of the Autonomia movement, the refusal to work, and the questions of wages, paternalism, and sexual difference. 

Alternating microscopic attention to details and zooming outward, Pinkus examines rituals of production, automation, repetition, and fractures in a narrative of labor that begins in the 1960s and extends to the present—the age of the precariat, right-wing resentment, and nostalgia for an order that was probably never was.

The story of dairying in Wisconsin is the story of how our very landscape and way of life were created. By making cows the center of our farm life and learning how to care for them, our ancestors launched a revolution that changed much more than the way farmers earned their living — it changed us.

The story of dairying in Wisconsin is the story of how our very landscape and way of life were created. By making cows the center of our farm life and learning how to care for them, our ancestors launched a revolution that changed much more than the way farmers earned their living — it changed us.

The story of dairying in Wisconsin is the story of how our very landscape and way of life were created. By making cows the center of our farm life and learning how to care for them, our ancestors launched a revolution that changed much more than the way farmers earned their living — it changed us.

In the summer of 1936, twenty-three-year-old May Swenson boarded a bus heading east out of her Mormon hometown of Logan, Utah. Her destination was New York City, where she had a single goal: become a poet. Creature tells the story of how this small-town woman fought to achieve her dreams in the Depression-era big city, keeping a roof over her head and honing her craft as she pursued romantic relationships with both men and women. After decades of struggle, Swenson became one of mid-century America’s most beloved and prolific poets.

What is it that makes her poetry so extraordinary? How did she see and reveal the world? How did she teach the art of poetry? And how does her work interact with her Mormon roots? Readers will learn the answers to these questions and more in this artfully written biography.

In the summer of 1936, twenty-three-year-old May Swenson boarded a bus heading east out of her Mormon hometown of Logan, Utah. Her destination was New York City, where she had a single goal: become a poet. Creature tells the story of how this small-town woman fought to achieve her dreams in the Depression-era big city, keeping a roof over her head and honing her craft as she pursued romantic relationships with both men and women. After decades of struggle, Swenson became one of mid-century America’s most beloved and prolific poets.

What is it that makes her poetry so extraordinary? How did she see and reveal the world? How did she teach the art of poetry? And how does her work interact with her Mormon roots? Readers will learn the answers to these questions and more in this artfully written biography.

What could possibly impel a relatively privileged twenty-four-year-old American-serving in the U.S. Army in Germany in 1952 to swim across the Danube River to what was then referred to as the Soviet Zone? How are we to understand his decision to forsake the land of his birth and build a new life in the still young German Democratic Republic? These are the questions at the core of this memoir by Victor Grossman, who was born Stephen Wechsler but changed his name after defecting to the GDR. 

A child of the Depression, Grossman witnessed firsthand the dislocations wrought by the collapse of the U.S. economy during the 1930s. Widespread unemployment and poverty, CIO sit-down strikes, and the fight to save Republican Spain from fascism-all made an indelible impression as he grew up in an environment that nurtured a commitment to left-wing causes. He continued his involvement with communist activities as a student at Harvard in the late 1940s and after graduation, when he took jobs in two factories in Buffalo, New York, and tried to organize their workers. 

Fleeing McCarthyite America and potential prosecution, Grossman worked in the GDR with other Western defectors and eventually became, as he notes, the “only person in the world to attend Harvard and Karl Marx universities.” Later, he was able to establish himself as a freelance journalist, lecturer, and author. Traveling throughout East Germany, he evaluated the failures as well as the successes of the GDR's “socialist experiment.” He also recorded his experiences, observations, and judgments of life in East Berlin after reunification, which failed to bring about the post-Communist paradise so many had expected. 

Written with humor as well as candor, Crossing the River provides a rare look at the Cold War from the other side of the ideological divide. 

Mark Solomon, a distinguished historian of the American left, provides a historical afterword that places Grossman's experiences in a larger Cold War context.