18284 books match the query 'United States' and 1260 start with c

cover of Campaign Crossroads: Presidential Politics in Indiana from Lincoln to Obama

Campaign Crossroads

Presidential Politics in Indiana from Lincoln to Obama

Andrew E. Stoner

Indiana Historical Society Press, 2017

Campaign Crossroads looks back over the varied, sometimes important, sometimes irrelevant, but always interesting presidential campaign cycles in Indiana’s history. By taking in the influences of technology, transportation and communication itself, we see an evolution in the political process that is not only altogether Hoosier, but also altogether American in its quality and importance. Using a narrative approach with a mix of primary and secondary sources, the work examines not only the rhetoric of presidents and presidential hopefuls, but also the nature of campaigns and their impact on Indiana communities. While Indiana enjoyed the position of being a battleground state for the better part of a century from the 1870s until the 1960s, it has also been ignored, dismissed, and has on occasion created unexpected political drama.
[more]
cover of Campaign Dynamics: The Race for Governor

Campaign Dynamics

The Race for Governor

Thomas M. Carsey

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Campaign Dynamics: The Race for Governor explores the dynamic interaction between candidates and voters that takes place during campaigns. It finds that voters respond in a meaningful way to what candidates say and do during their campaigns.
Candidates for state-wide and national offices spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to convey their messages to voters. Do voters hear them and respond? More specifically, do the issues candidates stress on the campaign trail influence the choices voters make when casting their ballots? The evidence presented in this book suggests that the answer is a resounding yes.
Campaign Dynamics examines more than one hundred gubernatorial elections from 1982 through 1994, beginning with case studies of the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey in 1993. Combining interviews and observations with empirical analysis of public opinion polls, the case studies develop the basic understanding of how campaigns define the set of important issues in an election. Then the analysis is expanded to consider the abortion issue in thirty-four gubernatorial elections in 1990. Later chapters test these ideas in over one hundred gubernatorial elections, combining exit poll data on upwards of 100,000 voters from dozens of races with measures of campaign themes developed out of a content analysis of newspaper coverage.
This book employs multiple methods and sources of data and represents one of the most comprehensive theoretical and empirical efforts to understand the role of campaigns in voting behavior ever undertaken.
Campaign Dynamics will be of interest to those who study state politics, voting behavior and campaigns, and democratic theory. It should also guide students and scholars interested in performing empirical tests of formal models and those wishing to combine multiple methods in their research.
Thomas M. Carsey is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago.
[more]
cover of Campaign Finance and American Democracy: What the Public Really Thinks and Why It Matters

Campaign Finance and American Democracy

What the Public Really Thinks and Why It Matters

David M. Primo and Jeffrey D. Milyo

University of Chicago Press, 2020

In recent decades, and particularly since the US Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision, lawmakers and other elites have told Americans that stricter campaign finance laws are needed to improve faith in the elections process, increase trust in the government, and counter cynicism toward politics. But as David M. Primo and Jeffrey D. Milyo argue, politicians and the public alike should reconsider the conventional wisdom in light of surprising and comprehensive empirical evidence to the contrary.

Primo and Milyo probe original survey data to determine Americans’ sentiments on the role of money in politics, what drives these sentiments, and why they matter. What Primo and Milyo find is that while many individuals support the idea of reform, they are also skeptical that reform would successfully limit corruption, which Americans believe stains almost every fiber of the political system. Moreover, support for campaign finance restrictions is deeply divided along party lines, reflecting the polarization of our times. Ultimately, Primo and Milyo contend, American attitudes toward money in politics reflect larger fears about the health of American democracy, fears that will not be allayed by campaign finance reform.
 
[more]
cover of Campaign Inc.: How Leadership and Organization Propelled Barack Obama to the White House

Campaign Inc.

How Leadership and Organization Propelled Barack Obama to the White House

Henry F. De Sio., Jr.

University of Iowa Press, 2014

It takes more than an excellent candidate to win elections; it takes an outstanding campaign organization, too. Campaign Inc. is the story of how leadership and organization propelled Barack Obama to the White House. As the chief operating officer of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Henry F. De Sio, Jr., was positioned to view this historic campaign as few others could. In this fascinating behind-the-scenes account, he whisks readers into Obama’s national election headquarters in Chicago to glimpse the decision-making processes and myriad details critical to running a successful and innovative presidential campaign. From the campaign’s early chaos to the jubilation and drama of winning the Iowa caucus, to the drawn-out Democratic nomination process, to Obama’s eventual election as president of the United States, De Sio guides readers through the challenges faced by the Obama for America campaign in its brief twenty-one-month lifespan.

De Sio shows readers that Obama himself was direct about his vision for the campaign when he instructed his staff to “run it like a business.” Thus, this is less the story of Barack Obama, candidate, and more the story of Barack Obama, CEO. Because campaigns are launched from scratch during every election cycle, they are the ultimate entrepreneurial experience. In the course of the election, the Obama campaign scaled up from a scrappy start-up to a nearly $1 billion operation, becoming a hothouse environment on which the glare of the media spotlight was permanently trained.

Campaign Inc. allows readers to peek behind the curtain at the underdog organization that brought down the Clinton campaign and later went on to defeat the Republican machine, while offering lessons in leadership and organization to innovators, executives, and entrepreneurs.
[more]
cover of Campaign Reform: Insights and Evidence

Campaign Reform

Insights and Evidence

Larry M. Bartels and Lynn Vavreck, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

What is wrong with American political campaigns? How could the campaign process be improved? This volume brings the expertise of leading political scientists to the public debate about campaign reform. These scholars probe the reality behind the conventional wisdom that nasty, vacuous campaigns dominated by big money and cynical media coverage are perverting our political process and alienating our citizenry.
Some of their conclusions will be startling to campaigners and critics alike. For example, "attack" advertisements prove to be no more effective than self-promotional advertisements, but are more substantive. Indeed, candidates in their advertisements and speeches focus more on policy and less on strategy and process than any major news outlet, including the New York Times. The volume suggests that, as a result, prospective voters in 1996 knew more about the candidates' issue positions than in any presidential election in decades, yet turnout and public faith in the electoral process continued to decline.
For aspiring reformers, Bartels and his colleagues provide a bracing reality check. For students and scholars of electoral politics, political communication, and voting behavior, they provide an authoritative summary and interpretation of what we know about the nature and impact of political campaigns. The insights and evidence contained in this volume should be of interest to anyone concerned about the present state and future prospects of American electoral process.
Larry M. Bartels is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Lynn Vavreck is Assistant Professor of Government, Dartmouth College. Other contributors are Bruce Buchanan, Tami Buhr, Ann Crigler, John G. Geer, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Marion Just, Daron R. Shaw, and John Zaller.
[more]
cover of Campaign: A Cartoon History of Bill Clinton's Race for the White House

Campaign

A Cartoon History of Bill Clinton's Race for the White House

Mary Ann Barton

University of Arkansas Press, 1993

This fascinating record chronicles Governor Bill Clinton’s 1992 bid for the presidency by gathering editorial cartoons from some of the nation’s premier magazines and newspapers. His meteoric rise from obscure origins as governor of a small southern state to his current position as the world’s most powerful head of state presents political cartoonists with a unique challenge.

For many people, in the United States and abroad, the dramas of the campaign created the character of Clinton. From the Gennifer Flowers debacle to Clinton’s
resurrection at the Democratic National Convention and the triumph of the election win, the incisive cartoons in this collection capture Clinton’s emerging image in a way that no written word can. The forty-five contributing artists use these cartoons to depict the breathtaking and colorful events that only a presidential campaign can produce and offer hours of entertainment for any reader.
[more]
cover of Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan

Campaigns of Knowledge

U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan

Malini Johar Schueller

Temple University Press, 2019

The creation of a new school system in the Philippines in 1898 and educational reforms in occupied Japan, both with stated goals of democratization, speaks to a singular vision of America as savior, following its politics of violence with benevolent recuperation. The pedagogy of recovery—in which schooling was central and natives were forced to accept empire through education—might have shown how Americans could be good occupiers, but it also created projects of Orientalist racial management: Filipinos had to be educated and civilized, while the Japanese had to be reeducated and “de-civilized.” 

In Campaigns of Knowledge, Malini Schueller contrapuntally reads state-sanctioned proclamations, educational agendas, and school textbooks alongside political cartoons, novels, short stories, and films to demonstrate how the U.S. tutelary project was rerouted, appropriated, reinterpreted, and resisted. In doing so, she highlights how schooling was conceived as a process of subjectification, creating particular modes of thought, behaviors, aspirations, and desires that would render the natives docile subjects amenable to American-style colonialism in the Philippines and occupation in Japan.

[more]
cover of Camping Out In The Yellowstone

Camping Out In The Yellowstone

William W. Slaughter

University of Utah Press, 1994

Camping out in Yellowstone, 1882 describes the park at a time when Yellowstone was truly an "out-back and beyond" experience.

Writing just five years after the army chased the Nez Peirce Indians through the area, and only ten years after the park’s establishment, Mary Richards provides a vivid picture of the undeveloped and untouristed Yellowstone Park: Fire Hole Basin, Mammoth Hot Spring, Lower Falls, and the Excelsior Geyser, now defunct but mightier at the time than Old Faithful. Augmented by twenty-eight contemporary photographs, this book offers a fascinating perspective for present-day Park lovers.

[more]
cover of Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Campus Life

Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

University of Chicago Press, 1988

"Based on subtle, imaginative readings of autobiographies, memoirs, fiction and secondary sources, [Campus Life] tells the story of the changing mentalities of American undergraduates over two centuries."—Michael Moffatt, New York Times Book Review
[more]
cover of Campus with Purpose: Building a Mission-Driven Campus

Campus with Purpose

Building a Mission-Driven Campus

Stephen Lehmkuhle

Rutgers University Press, 2021

When Stephen Lehmkuhle became the chancellor of the brand-new University of Minnesota-Rochester campus, he had to start from scratch. He did not inherit a legacy mission that established what the campus did and how to do it; rather, he needed to find a way to rationalize the existence of the nascent campus. Lehmkuhle recognized that without a shared understanding of purpose, the scope of a new campus expands at an unsustainable rate as it tries to be all things to all people, and so his first act was to decide on the driving purpose of the campus. He then used this purpose to make decisions about institutional design, scope, programs, and campus activities. Through personal and engaging anecdotes about his experience, Lehmkuhle describes how higher education leaders can focus on campus purpose to create new and fresh ways to think about many elements of campus operation and function, and how leaders can protect the campus’s purpose from the pervasive higher education culture that is hardened by history and habit.
[more]
cover of Campuses of Consent: Sexual and Social Justice in Higher Education

Campuses of Consent

Sexual and Social Justice in Higher Education

Theresa A. Kulbaga and Leland G. Spencer

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

Winner of the 2020 OSCLG Outstanding Book Award
This new book for scholars and university administrators offers a provocative critique of sexual justice language and policy in higher education around the concept of consent. Complicating the idea that consent is plain common sense, Campuses of Consent shows how normative and inaccurate concepts about gender, gender identity, and sexuality erase queer or trans students' experiences and perpetuate narrow, regressive gender norms and individualist frameworks for understanding violence.

Theresa A. Kulbaga and Leland G. Spencer prove that consent in higher education cannot be meaningfully separated from larger issues of institutional and structural power and oppression. While sexual assault advocacy campaigns, such as It's On Us, federal legislation from Title IX to the Clery Act, and more recent affirmative-consent measures tend to construct consent in individualist terms, as something “given” or “received” by individuals, the authors imagine consent as something that can be constructed systemically and institutionally: in classrooms, campus communication, and shared campus spaces.

[more]
cover of Can I Get a Witness!: Faith, Family, and Chicago Gospel Music

Can I Get a Witness!

Faith, Family, and Chicago Gospel Music

Steven B. Dolins with Gregory Donald Gay

University of Chicago Press, 2026

The remarkable story of pastor Donald Gay and his family’s lasting contributions to gospel music and Chicago culture.

When the preacher Gregory Donald Gay joined his sisters onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1950, on a sold-out bill they shared with Mahalia Jackson and the Clara Ward Singers, he became a participant in a landmark moment: the first concert in the venue to feature entirely gospel music. He was just five years old.

The Gay Sisters—Evelyn, Geraldine, and Mildred—were key figures in gospel’s Golden Age, and their youngest brother had a front-row seat. Evelyn and Geraldine each innovated singular approaches to gospel piano, while Mildred sang. Together, they toured and performed on a series of influential gospel recordings from 1948 to 1973, playing the Apollo Theatre and crossing paths with musical luminaries like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, Pops Staples, and Dizzy Gillespie. But despite a hit record and prodigious talent, the Gay Sisters faded from the limelight. In the ensuing years, they weathered personal trials while their mother, Fannie, devoted her attention to another family undertaking: starting a church.

Can I Get a Witness! is a call-and-response between Steven B. Dolins, founder of The Sirens Records, and Donald Gay, who vividly describes his boyhood in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood, his family’s remarkable place in gospel history, his mother’s work as a faith leader, and his own calling as a pastor. The book spotlights the rich contributions of a family remembered not only for the songs they recorded but also for their unwavering kindness to others, a legacy that the legendary Sonny Rollins recounts in a moving foreword.

[more]
cover of Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?: American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?

American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century

Mary Drake McFeely

University of Massachusetts Press, 2000

In the rural America of the past, a woman's reputation was sometimes made by her cherry pie—or her chocolate layer cake, or her biscuits. As America modernized and as women left the home, entered the paid labor force, and battled their way to success in the professions, mastery of cooking remained an accepted sign that a woman took her gendered responsibilities seriously. Ironically, over the course of the twentieth century, as ready-made foods and kitchen appliances made home cooking less essential and labor-intensive, skill in the kitchen continued to be perceived not only by society but often by women themselves as a measure of a woman's true value. 

This book shows how cooking developed and evolved during the twentieth century. From Fannie Farmer to Julia Child, new challenges arose to replace the old. Women found themselves still tied to the kitchen, but for different reasons and with the need to acquire new skills. Instead of simply providing sustenance for the family, they now had to master more complex cooking techniques, the knowledge of “ethnic” cuisines, the science of nutrition, the business of consumerism, and, perhaps most important of all, the art of keeping their husbands and children happy and healthy.

[more]
cover of Can This Marriage Be Saved?: A Memoir

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

A Memoir

Nancy McCabe

University of Missouri Press, 2020

In this warm, deeply-personal, and often humorous book, Nancy McCabe re-examines and gains new understanding of her early life and her ill-advised marriage. Borrowing from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” how-to essays and before-and-after weight loss ads, a curriculum guide, Bible study notes, an obsession with Tom Swiftie jokes, and women’s magazine columns and quizzes that oversimplified women’s lives and choices, McCabe examines the many influences that led to her youthful marriage—and out of it, into finally taking control of her life.
[more]
cover of Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel

Canaan Bound

The African-American Great Migration Novel

Lawrence R. Rodgers

University of Illinois Press, 1997

 
      The Great Migration--the exodus of more than six million blacks from
        their southern homes hoping for better lives in the North--is a defining
        event of post-emancipation African-American life and a central feature
        of twentieth-century black literature. Lawrence Rodgers explores the historical
        and literary significance of this event and in the process identifies
        the Great Migration novel as a literary form that intertwines geography
        and identity.
      Drawing on a wide range of major literary voices, including Richard Wright,
        Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known writers such
        as William Attaway (Blood on the Forge) and Dorothy West (The Living Is
        Easy), Rodgers conducts a kind of literary archaeology of the Great Migration.
        He mines the writers' biographical connections to migration and teases
        apart the ways in which individual novels relate to one another, to the
        historical situation of black America, and to African-American literature
        as a whole.
      In reading migration novels in relation to African-American literary
        texts such as slave narratives, folk tales, and urban fiction, Rodgers
        affirms the southern folk roots of African-American culture and argues
        for a need to stem the erosion of southern memory.
 
[more]
cover of Canada-U.S. Tax Comparisons

Canada-U.S. Tax Comparisons

Edited by John B. Shoven and John Whalley

University of Chicago Press, 1992

In the increasingly global economy, domestic tax policies have taken on a new importance for international economics. This unique volume compares the tax reform experiences of Canada and the United States, two countries with the world's largest bilateral flow of trade and investment.

With the signing of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement and the tax reforms of the 1980s, there has been some harmonization of tax systems. But geographic, cultural, and political characteristics shape distinct national social policies that may impede harmonization. As the U.S. and Canadian economies become even more integrated, differences in tax systems will have important effects, in particular on the relative rates of economic growth.

In this timely study, scholars from both countries show that, while the United States and Canada exhibit similar corporate tax structures and income tax systems, they have very different approaches to sales tax and social security taxes. Despite these differences, the two countries generate roughly the same amounts of revenue, produce similar costs of capital, and produce comparable distributions of income.
[more]
cover of Canaries in the Code Mine: Precarity and the Future of Tech Work

Canaries in the Code Mine

Precarity and the Future of Tech Work

Max Papadantonakis

Temple University Press, 2025

The idea that the tech industry is a secure field with jobs and opportunities for growth is a myth. There is widespread precarity among software developers, who experience uncertainty, anxiety, and imposter syndrome as technological advancements threaten job security. Max Papadantonakis investigates this phenomenon in his revealing study, Canaries in the Code Mine. He indicates that precarity is not just about the risk of losing one’s job; it is about living in a career where basic needs and rights are not guaranteed.

Interviewing 120 software developers from leading tech firms, Papadantonakis shows how temporary contracts, project cancellations, and company downsizing undermine the security of even highly skilled professionals. He also highlights the systemic inequalities that shape the tech industry, showing how age, race, and gender often dictate the opportunities and responsibilities software developers have—or are denied.  

Canaries in the Code Mine highlights a disturbing reality of privilege and vulnerability within the tech industry. Papadantonakis engages in a critical discourse on the evolving nature of work in the digital era, emphasizing the need to shape an equitable future in the rapidly evolving landscape.
[more]
cover of Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy

Cancel Wars

How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy

Sigal R. Ben-Porath

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An even-handed exploration of the polarized state of campus politics that suggests ways for schools and universities to encourage discourse across difference. 

College campuses have become flashpoints of the current culture war and, consequently, much ink has been spilled over the relationship between universities and the cultivation or coddling of young American minds. Philosopher Sigal R. Ben-Porath takes head-on arguments that infantilize students who speak out against violent and racist discourse on campus or rehash interpretations of the First Amendment. Ben-Porath sets out to demonstrate the role of the university in American society and, specifically, how it can model free speech in ways that promote democratic ideals.

In Cancel Wars, she argues that the escalating struggles over “cancel culture,” “safe spaces,” and free speech on campus are a manifestation of broader democratic erosion in the United States. At the same time, she takes a nuanced approach to the legitimate claims of harm put forward by those who are targeted by hate speech. Ben-Porath’s focus on the boundaries of acceptable speech (and on the disproportional impact that hate speech has on marginalized groups) sheds light on the responsibility of institutions to respond to extreme speech in ways that proactively establish conversations across difference. Establishing these conversations has profound implications for political discourse beyond the boundaries of collegiate institutions. If we can draw on the truth, expertise, and reliable sources of information that are within the work of academic institutions, we might harness the shared construction of knowledge that takes place at schools, colleges, and universities against truth decay. Of interest to teachers and school leaders, this book shows that by expanding and disseminating knowledge, universities can help rekindle the civic trust that is necessary for revitalizing democracy.
 
[more]
cover of Cancer Activism: Gender, Media, and Public Policy

Cancer Activism

Gender, Media, and Public Policy

Karen M. Kedrowski and Marilyn Stine Sarow

University of Illinois Press, 2010

The first comparison of the breast cancer and the prostate cancer movements

Cancer Activism explores the interplay between advocacy, the media, and public perception through an analysis of breast cancer and prostate cancer activist groups over a nearly twenty-year period. Despite both diseases having nearly identical mortality and morbidity rates, Karen M. Kedrowski and Marilyn Stine Sarow present evidence from more than 4,200 news articles to show that the different groups have had markedly different impacts. They trace the rise of each movement from its beginning and explore how discussions about the diseases appeared on media, public, and government agendas. In an important exception to the feminist tenet that women as a group hold less power than men, Kedrowski and Sarow demonstrate that the breast cancer movement is not only larger and better organized than the prostate cancer movement, it is also far more successful at shaping media coverage, public opinion, and government policy.

[more]
cover of Candidates, Congress, and the American Democracy

Candidates, Congress, and the American Democracy

Linda L. Fowler

University of Michigan Press, 1993

In Candidates, Congress, and the American Democracy Linda L. Fowler provides a wide-ranging examination of candidacy as a source of both stability and change in U.S. politics. An expert on political candidates, she brings a novel perspective to the topic by emphasizing that candidates are necessary instruments for popular control of government.

Fowler maintains that the ambitions of individual candidates are essential to the functioning of the nation's constitutional system and are important factors in its political history. She traces the influence of candidates in fostering electoral competition, promoting the representation of such newly mobilized groups of citizens as women and ethnic minorities, and transforming political institutions and parties. Despite the importance of candidacy, the institution is poorly understood because both scholars and voters tend to limit their focus on candidates to the narrow context of election campaigns. The author argues that a broader view reveals how candidates are linked to a variety of trends and contradictions in contemporary U.S. politics.

[more]
cover of Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost

Cane Ridge

America's Pentecost

Paul K. Conkin

University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

What happened at or near the Cane Ridge meeting house in central Kentucky in August 1801 has become a legendary event in American religious history. Never before in America had so many thousands of people gathered for what became much more than the planned Presbyterian communion service. Never had so many families camped on the grounds. Never before had so many people been affected with involuntary physical exercises—sobbing, shouting, shaking, and swooning. And never before in American had a religious meeting led to so much national publicity, triggered so much controversy, or helped provoke such important denominational schisms.


    Paul Conkin tells the story of Cane Ridge in all its dimensions. The backdrop involves the convoluted history of Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism in America, the pluralistic religious environment in early Kentucky, and the gradual evolution of a new form of evangelical religious culture in eighteenth-century America.


    The aftermath was complex. Cane Ridge helped popularize religious camps and influenced the subsequent development of planned camp meetings. It exposed deep and developing divisions of doctrine among Presbyterian clergy, and contributed to the birth of two new denominations —Christians (Disciples of Christ) and Cumberland Presbyterians and furthered the growth of a new revival culture, keyed to a crisis-like conversion experience, even as it marked a gradual decline in sacramentalism.
[more]
cover of Canfield Drive: A History of Race and the American City on a Street in St. Louis

Canfield Drive

A History of Race and the American City on a Street in St. Louis

Matthew Knox Averett

University of Missouri Press, 2027

Winner of the 2026 Missouri Conference on History Book Award; the 2026 Missouri History Book Award; and shortlisted for the 2026 ASU Humanities Book Award

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown and a friend were walking down Canfield Drive, a residential street in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. There, they encountered Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. Moments later, Brown was dead on the street—shot by Wilson at least six times. That evening, a memorial appeared on the pavement where he had fallen. In the days that followed, vigils turned into protests, and protests into an Uprising, as police in riot gear faced off with a grieving, outraged community. For nearly two weeks, Ferguson commanded the nation’s attention. The killing of Michael Brown was an outrage and it should not have happened. But Canfield Drive was primed for tragedy long before that fatal encounter because the street was already a place of racial conflict. This was no accident. 
 
Canfield Drive: A History of Race and the American City on a Street in St. Louis uncovers the deeper history behind the street where Brown died, tracing how race and the built environment have long intersected in St. Louis—from the city’s founding to the Ferguson Uprising. The book follows the story of Black space across two centuries: from early Black communities, to the birth of the St. Louis Blues, to the Halcyon days of The Ville, to the destruction of Mill Creek Valley, to the tragedy of Pruitt-Igoe, and to the construction of Canfield Drive. Though Canfield Drive is the first comprehensive history of St. Louis’s Black urban landscape, it is more than just St. Louis's story. Canfield Drive details the racial engineering of the American city. Here is the machinery of American segregation laid bare: occupancy covenants, court decisions, racial steering, white flight, public housing, voucher systems, and predatory policing that combine to transform neighborhoods into traps. Here too are the people who fought back, building community against staggering odds and securing civil rights reforms that transformed America's understanding of government's obligations to its citizens.
 
Canfield Drive provides a powerful lens on the national story of race and the American city and reveals how Michael Brown's death was not just one officer's deadly decision, but the inevitable outcome of America's built environment—a tragedy centuries in the making, on a street designed for violence. This is how a place becomes a powder keg. This is how history erupts into headlines. This is the story behind the story that America couldn't look away from. This is the story of how a street came to matter, and how it came to stand for something far greater than itself.

[more]
cover of Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas

Cannibal Democracy

Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas

Zita Nunes

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

Zita Nunes argues that the prevailing narratives of identity formation throughout the Americas share a dependence on metaphors of incorporation and, often, of cannibalism. From the position of the incorporating body, the construction of a national and racial identity through a process of assimilation presupposes a remainder, a residue.

Nunes addresses works by writers and artists who explore what is left behind in the formation of national identities and speak to the limits of the contemporary discourse of democracy. Cannibal Democracy tracks its central metaphor’s circulation through the work of writers such as Mário de Andrade, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison and journalists of the black press, as well as work by visual artists including Magdalena Campos-Pons and Keith Piper, and reveals how exclusion-understood in terms of what is left out-can be fruitfully understood in terms of what is left over from a process of unification or incorporation.

Nunes shows that while this remainder can be deferred into the future-lurking as a threat to the desired stability of the present-the residue haunts discourses of national unity, undermining the ideologies of democracy that claim to resolve issues of race.

Zita Nunes is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

[more]
cover of Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Cannibal Fictions

American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Jeff Berglund

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

    Objects of fear and fascination, cannibals have long signified an elemental "otherness," an existence outside the bounds of normalcy. In the American imagination, the figure of the cannibal has evolved tellingly over time, as Jeff Berglund shows in this study encompassing a strikingly eclectic collection of cultural, literary, and cinematic texts.
    Cannibal Fictions brings together two discrete periods in U.S. history: the years between the Civil War and World War I, the high-water mark in America's imperial presence, and the post-Vietnam era, when the nation was beginning to seriously question its own global agenda. Berglund shows how P. T. Barnum, in a traveling exhibit featuring so-called "Fiji cannibals," served up an alien "other" for popular consumption, while Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Tarzan of the Apes series tapped into similar anxieties about the eruption of foreign elements into a homogeneous culture. Turning to the last decades of the twentieth century, Berglund considers how treatments of cannibalism variously perpetuated or subverted racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies rooted in earlier times. Fannie Flagg's novel Fried Green Tomatoes invokes cannibalism to new effect, offering an explicit critique of racial, gender, and sexual politics (an element to a large extent suppressed in the movie adaptation). Recurring motifs in contemporary Native American writing suggest how Western expansion has, cannibalistically, laid the seeds of its own destruction. And James Dobson's recent efforts to link the pro-life agenda to allegations of cannibalism in China testify still further to the currency and pervasiveness of this powerful trope.
    By highlighting practices that preclude the many from becoming one, these representations of cannibalism, Berglund argues, call into question the comforting national narrative of e pluribus unum.
[more]
cover of Cannoneers in Gray: The Field Artillery of the Army of Tennessee

Cannoneers in Gray

The Field Artillery of the Army of Tennessee

Larry J. Daniel

University of Alabama Press, 1989

A highly regarded resource on a critical aspect of the Civil War
 
This enlarged edition of Cannoneers in Gray provides new detail concerning the activities of artillery units operating in key campaigns of the western theater of the Civil War—at Stones River, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain, Shiloh, Peachtree Creek. Larry Daniel traces the four-year history of the artillery branch of the Army of Tennessee from its organization through its demise at the war's end. He shows that Civil War cannons were of little consequence when used as offensive weapons but could be highly effective in defense.
 
Includes five new maps of campaigns and battles central to his discussion of larger issues, such as command and strategy on the western front.
 
[more]
cover of Canoeing the Delaware River

Canoeing the Delaware River

Letcher, Gary

Rutgers University Press, 1997

Canoeing the Delaware River provides a mile-by-mile account of the Delaware's course from where the East and West Branches meet in Hancock, New York, two hundred miles downstream to tidewater at Trenton, New Jersey. The book describes rapids, access areas, and points of interest in detail. It is an invaluable resource to both the novice out for an afternoon paddle and the adventurer on a ten-day trip. This completely revised and updated edition provides new maps, guides to river outfitters, campgrounds, information sources on river conditions, and new photographs.In addition to guiding the way, Canoeing the Delaware River portrays the people, places, and events associated with the river from its colorful past through present times. Gary Letcher also includes information on canoe safety and environmental concerns.
[more]
cover of Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies

Canons by Consensus

Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies

Joseph Csicsila, with a foreword by Tom Quirk

University of Alabama Press, 2004

The first systematic analysis of American literature textbooks used by college instructors in the last century

Scholars have long noted the role that college literary anthologies play in the rising and falling reputations of American authors. Canons by Consensus examines this classroom fixture in detail to challenge and correct a number of assumptions about the development of the literary canon throughout the 20th century.

Joseph Csicsila analyzes more than 80 anthologies published since 1919 and traces not only the critical fortunes of individual authors, but also the treatment of entire genres and groupings of authors by race, region, gender, and formal approach. In doing so, he calls into question accusations of deliberate or inadvertent sexism and racism. Selections by anthology editors, Csicsila demonstrates, have always been governed far more by prevailing trends in academic criticism than by personal bias.

Academic anthologies are found to constitute a rich and often overlooked resource for studying American literature, as well as an irrefutable record of the academy’s changing literary tastes throughout the last century.

[more]
cover of Canyon and Cosmos: Searching for Human Identity in the Grand Canyon

Canyon and Cosmos

Searching for Human Identity in the Grand Canyon

Don Lago

University of Nevada Press, 2025

Named one of the 2026 Southwest Books of the Year

Throughout history, humans have sought creation stories to define our identity and affirm our connections with the universe, diverse life forms, and one another. Over the last two centuries, science has delivered a bold new creation story full of immense time and space, extraordinary objects, and powerful natural forces. Science ideas can seem mere abstractions, but at the Grand Canyon, better than anywhere else on Earth, our new creation story is manifested physically and powerfully.
 
A major work of literary nature writing, Canyon and Cosmos takes readers on a journey through the Grand Canyon's deep time, geological forces, and biological evolution, making them very real, personal, and meaningful. Through decades of hiking and kayaking, author Don Lago has gotten to know the canyon intimately. Ranging through world mythologies and Native American spirituality, he explores how humans have sought to understand the universe. He confronts existential questions of whether humans can find enough meaning in the scientific cosmos. Through poetic prose, symbolism, and philosophical insight, he shows how existence itself is our deepest source of life and meaning.  

[more]
cover of Canyon of Dreams: Stories from Grand Canyon History

Canyon of Dreams

Stories from Grand Canyon History

Don Lago

University of Utah Press, 2014

The Grand Canyon—long recognized as one of North America’s premier natural wonders—has stirred human imagination and creativity, leaving an indelible mark on all who have encountered its spectacular vistas and intricate landscapes. Stories of the canyon’s early inhabitants to its modern day visitors are as varied and deep as the canyon’s cliffs.

In 1928 astronomer Edwin Hubble came to the canyon to test it as a site for the world’s greatest observatory. In the 1960s the Apollo astronauts hiked into the canyon to learn geology in preparation for lunar explorations. Famous writers and poets have looked to the canyon to find the meanings of nature and God. Dreamers turned a 1909 newspaper hoax into an elaborate myth about ancient Egyptian tombs in the canyon. Canyon of Dreams tells these and other stories, including that of Brighty the burro, who inspired a classic children’s novel, and the story of a teenaged Roger Miller, who spent a summer living in a trailer and “pushin’ broom” at the canyon, leading to his song “King of the Road.” Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s fight against the National Park Service to retain property he owned on the canyon rim is another illuminating tale. Despite being little known in the official annals of Grand Canyon history, the fight served as a pivotal moment in the much broader struggle between promoters of wilderness conquest and those advocating for preservation.
This eclectic compilation runs the gamut from the idiosyncratic to the landmark, the mythical to the empirical, and everything in between. The narratives are captivating and sure to appeal to readers interested in the Grand Canyon’s long and complex history. The work is thoroughly researched and will prove a valuable contribution to historical scholarship. Canyon of Dreams sheds light on many obscure aspects of the canyon and takes readers on rollicking adventures in the process.

[more]
cover of Canyon, Mountain, Cloud: Absence and Longing in American Parks

Canyon, Mountain, Cloud

Absence and Longing in American Parks

Tyra A. Olstad

Oregon State University Press, 2021

What do we seek and what do we find when we visit parks and protected areas? What does it mean to become so deeply attached to a beautiful, wild place that it becomes part of one’s identity? And why does it matter if a particular landscape doesn’t speak to one’s soul?

Part memoir and part scholarly analysis of the psychological and societal dimensions of place-creation, Canyon, Mountain, Cloud details the author’s experiences working and living in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Denali National Park and Preserve, Adirondack State Park, and arctic Alaska. Along the way, Olstad explores canyons, climbs mountains, watches clouds, rafts rivers, searches for fossils, and protects rare and fragile vegetation. She learns and shares local natural and cultural histories, questions perceptions of “wilderness,” deepens her appreciation for wildness, and reshapes her understanding of self and self-in-place.

Anyone who has ever felt appreciation for wild places and who wants to think more deeply about individual and societal relationships with American parks and protected areas will find humor, fear, provocation, wonder, awe, and, above all, inspiration in these pages.
[more]
cover of Canyoneering 2: Technical Loop Hikes in Southern Utah

Canyoneering 2

Technical Loop Hikes in Southern Utah

Steve Allen

University of Utah Press, 2002

Canyoneering 2: Technical Loop Hikes is a guide to seven, week-long backpack trips into some for the most unspoiled and least-visited areas in the Utah section of the Colorado Plateau. Every hike contains the four essentials of a great canyoneering route: spectacular canyons, intimate narrows, big views, and physical challenge. Although the routes are difficult, newcomers to the canyons will also find detailed information here that can be used to plan less demanding excursions. Hikes include Muddy Creek in the San Rafael Swell, Dirty Devil North, Dirty Devil South, Dark Canyon, White Canyon, Escalante East, and Escalante South. For experienced canyoneers.

[more]
cover of Canyoneering 3: Loop Hikes in Utah’s Escalante

Canyoneering 3

Loop Hikes in Utah’s Escalante

Steve Allen

University of Utah Press, 1997

Utah’s Escalante country: a vast jigsaw puzzle of desert canyons, draws, defiles, gorges, slots, and washes demarcating upland expanses of slickrock, benches, and ridges, above which stand towers, pinnacles, and peaks. Inhabited for centuries by the ancient Puebloans and now managed primarily by various federal agencies, it is a land of stark contrasts and unforgettable beauty.

This guide features 37 major hikes designed to satisfy any canyoneer from novice to expert, including 20 in the new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. All hikes are designed as loops, eliminating the need to backtrack or car shuttle for those inclined to do the full routes. Dayhikers can choose routes from an hour to all day, backpackers will find multi-day hikes, and those who prefer charting their own course will also profit from the information here.

Aside from the detailed route descriptions, Canyoneering 3 describes 14 road sections plus side roads to ensure time will not be lost finding a trailhead in this often confusing country. Also included are sections on geology, history, equipment, and technical canyoneering. Thoroughly researched, this is now the most comprehensive guide to the wonderland of the Escalante.

Hikes include: Death Hollow; Sand Creek; Boulder Mail Trail; Big Flat Wash, the Escalante River, and the Bowington Road; Middle Boulder Creek; Upper Boulder Creek and Dry Hollow; Phipps Wash; Big Horn Canyon; The Escalante River and the Sand Slides; Red Breaks Canyon; Harris Wash; Egypt 3-The Slot; Lower Harris Wash; Fence Canyon, the Escalante River, and Twenty-five Mile Wash; Twenty-five Mile Wash, the Escalante River, and Scorpion Gulch; Spooky and Peek-a-Book Gulches-The Long Loop; Upper Brimstone Gulch-The Slot; Scorpion Gulch and the Scorpion Horse Trail; Peek-a-Boo and Spooky Gulches-The Standard Loop; Coyote Gulch; Stevens Canyon and the Waterpocket Fold; Stevens and Fold Canyons; The Pollywog Bench Area; Forty-mile Creek and Willow Gulch Everett Russ; Fifty-mile Creek; Sixty Point and Twilight Canyon; Llewellyn and Cottonwood Gulches; Davis Gulch; Clear Creek and the Cathedral in the Desert; Deer Creek; Steep Creek and Horse Canyon; The Gulch and Horse Canyon; Little Death Hollow and Wolverine Creek; Egg Canyon and Lamanite Arch; Silver Falls Creek and Choprock Canyon; Deer Point-An Ascent; Moody Creek Canyons

[more]
cover of Canyoneering the Northern San Rafael Swell

Canyoneering the Northern San Rafael Swell

Steve Allen

University of Utah Press, 2013

The San Rafael Swell is a seemingly endless expanse of slickrock, reefs, rivers, narrow canyons, mesas, towers, and pinnacles. It is the wilderness home of coyotes, eagles, mountain lions, and bighorn sheep. Steve Allen’s Canyoneering: The San Rafael Swell has long been the standard for exploring this remarkable area. With the input of fellow guidebook author Joe Mitchell, Canyoneering the Northern San Rafael Swell replacesthe older volume with a completely rewritten and updated text containing more detail, greater accuracy, and a tighter focus on the northern half of the Swell. This is the most current and comprehensive guide to the region. Designed for wilderness enthusiasts of all ages and skill levels, this guide provides detailed information on 25 hikes, including trip length, difficulty, elevation gain, and water sources. Side trips, points of interest, and historical information are noted throughout the text. This guidebook includes for the first time a wealth of topographic maps for all routes and roads, elevation profiles, and GPS coordinates.

A second volume covering the southern portion of the San Rafael Swell is in preparation.
[more]
cover of Canyonlands Country: Geology of Canyonlands and Arches National Parks

Canyonlands Country

Geology of Canyonlands and Arches National Parks

Donald L. Baars

University of Utah Press, 1993

An easy-to-read geological history of the amazing red rock landscapes in southeastern Utah.

Towering red buttes, plunging canyon walls, domes, pinnacles, spires, ten thousand strangely carved forms—what visitor hasn’t marveled at the land of rock in southeastern Utah that is Canyonlands Country?

Canyonlands Country offers a unique geological history of this awesome landscape, in language understandable by the non-geologist. The story is as strange and fascinating as the land itself. Each exposed rock layer has a different geologic history: one is a stream deposit, another is an ancient field of dunes, another was deposited by shallow tropic seas. The Green and Colorado Rivers began carving canyons thirty million years ago, but to understand such relatively recent events Canyonlands Country takes us on a journey of two billion years.

Tours include Arches National Park, Island in the Sky, Needles District, The Maze and Elaterite Basin, Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons, Meander Canyon, and Cataract Canyon.

[more]
cover of Canyons of the Southwest: A Tour of the Great Canyon Country from Colorado to Northern Mexico

Canyons of the Southwest

A Tour of the Great Canyon Country from Colorado to Northern Mexico

John Annerino

University of Arizona Press, 1993

The canyons of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico contain some of the most dramatic landscapes in the world. John Annerino's pictorial celebration of this visually rich region is a handsome memento for those who have heard the wind whistling in these haunting canyons, and a beckoning invitation for those who have not yet made the journey.

Annerino has spent much of his adult life exploring this territory—as wilderness runner, adventurer, and photojournalist—and combines his firsthand knowledge with his expertise as a nature photographer and author to create an intimate portrait of these timeless places. Accompanying the photographs are informative essays describing the region's geological and human history.

[more]
cover of Cape Cod: An Environmental History of a Fragile Ecosystem

Cape Cod

An Environmental History of a Fragile Ecosystem

John T. Cumbler

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

To many, Cape Cod represents the classic setting for an American summer vacation. Attracting seasonal tourists with picturesque beaches and abundant seafood, the Cape has held a place in our national imagination for almost two hundred years. People have been drawn to its beauty and resources since Native Americans wandered up its long sandy peninsula some 12,000 years ago, while writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Norman Mailer have celebrated its mystery and allure. But, despite its idealized image, Cape Cod has a long history of scarcity and an increasingly evident fragility.

John T. Cumbler's book offers an environmental, social, and economic history of Cape Cod told through the experiences of residents as well as visitors. He notes that over the past four hundred years the Cape has experienced three regimes of resource utilization. The first regime of Native Americans who lived relatively lightly on the land was supplanted by European settlers who focused on production and extraction. This second regime began in the age of sail but declined through the age of steam as the soil and seas failed to yield the resources necessary to sustain continuing growth. Environmental and then economic crises during the second half of the nineteenth century eventually gave way to the third regime of tourism and recreation. But this regime has its own environmental costs, as residents have learned over the last half century.

Although the Cape remains a special place, its history of resource scarcity and its attempts to deal with that scarcity offer useful lessons for anyone addressing similar issues around the globe.
[more]
cover of Cape May County, New Jersey: The Making of an American Resort Community

Cape May County, New Jersey

The Making of an American Resort Community

Dorwart, Jeffery M

Rutgers University Press, 1992

Cape May County, at the southern tip of New Jersey, is one of America's most vibrant seashore resorts. Jeffery Dorwart has written a history of this community from its earliest settlement as an Atlantic maritime and farming frontier to its development today as a major regional tourist attraction. From earliest times, Cape May County was a region of cultural ferment, as American Indians, African-American slaves, European Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians struggled to coexist on the wild, isolated Jersey Cape. Despite this variety of settlers, a distinct type of resident, known as the whaler yeoman, dominated affairs on the Cape May peninsula for over two hundred years. Railroad development and the arrival during the late nineteenth century of Eastern European, Italian, and Scandinavian immigrants gradually changed Cape May County society. A multiethnic, multicultural community evolved that threatened whaler yeoman domination. New settlements appeared in the pine wilderness of the mainland and on the uninhabited Atlantic Ocean barrier islands. These changes caused social and political conflicts, and new development assaulted the fragile seashore environment. Fishing and shipbuilding were key industries throughout the early history of Cape May County. In addition, familiar industries such as cranberry harvesting and nearly forgotten endeavors such as goldbeating, sugar refining, and cedar shingle mining played vital roles in the county's economic development. Dorwart also traces the origins of the seashore resort industry through the history of the city of Cape May, with its unique architectural styles and heritage, as well as the founding of Wildwood, Ocean City, and the newer resort towns. The story of how Cape May County responded to dramatic change not only illuminates the historical development of a New Jersey seashore community but also enhances our understanding of the American experience with changing social and economic conditions.
[more]
cover of Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories

Capital Consequences

Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories

King, Rachel

Rutgers University Press, 2004

Those who support capital punishment often claim that they do so because it provides justice and closure for the victims’ families. In Capital Consequences, attorney Rachel King reminds us that there are other families and other victims who must be considered in the debate over the death penalty.

Combining a narrative voice with vivid, passionate, and painful accounts of the families of death row inmates, the book demonstrates that crimes that lead to death sentences also devastate the families of those convicted. These families, King argues, are the unseen victims of capital punishment.

King challenges readers to question the morality of a punishment that victimizes families of the condemned and ripples out through future generations. Chapters tell the stories of families that have lost life savings supporting an accused loved one, endured intense public scrutiny, been subjected to harassment by the media, and are struggling to live with the inhumane treatment that their loved ones receive on death row.  The author also explores the unique nature of the grief that these families suffer. Because their pain tends to elicit less attention and empathy than that of the crime victims’ families, King shows how it becomes much more desperate and isolating.

On a human level, this book is a powerful reminder that tragic events have tragic consequences that far outreach their immediate victims. At the same time, the accounts illustrate many of the flaws inherent in the judicial system—racial and economic bias, incompetent counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, the execution of juveniles, and wrongful convictions, some of which are only now being overturned because of recent advances in DNA technology.

Regardless of which side of the death penalty issue you are on, this book will lead you to pause and consider that all acts—criminal and retributive—have broader human implications than we are sometimes willing to realize.

 

[more]
cover of Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience

Capital Culture

J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience

Neil Harris

University of Chicago Press, 2013

American art museums flourished in the late twentieth century, and the impresario leading much of this growth was J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, from 1969 to 1992.  Along with S. Dillon Ripley, who served as Smithsonian secretary for much of this time, Brown reinvented the museum experience in ways that had important consequences for the cultural life of Washington and its visitors as well as for American museums in general. In Capital Culture, distinguished historian Neil Harris provides a wide-ranging look at Brown’s achievement and the growth of museum culture during this crucial period.

Harris combines his in-depth knowledge of American history and culture with extensive archival research, and he has interviewed dozens of key players to reveal how Brown’s showmanship transformed the National Gallery. At the time of the Cold War, Washington itself was growing into a global destination, with Brown as its devoted booster. Harris describes Brown’s major role in the birth of blockbuster exhibitions, such as the King Tut show of the late 1970s and the National Gallery’s immensely successful Treasure Houses of Britain, which helped inspire similarly popular exhibitions around the country. He recounts Brown’s role in creating the award-winning East Building by architect I. M. Pei and the subsequent renovation of the West building. Harris also explores the politics of exhibition planning, describing Brown's courtship of corporate leaders, politicians, and international dignitaries.

In this monumental book Harris brings to life this dynamic era and exposes the creation of Brown's impressive but costly legacy, one that changed the face of American museums forever.
[more]
cover of Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market

Capital Letters

Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market

David Dowling

University of Iowa Press, 2009

In the 1840s and 1850s, as the market revolution swept the United States, the world of literature confronted for the first time the gaudy glare of commercial culture. Amid growing technological sophistication and mounting artistic rejection of the soullessness of materialism, authorship passed from an era of patronage and entered the clamoring free market. In this setting, romantic notions of what it meant to be an author came under attack, and authors became professionals.

In lively and provocative writing, David Dowling moves beyond a study of the emotional toll that this crisis in self-definition had on writers to examine how three sets of authors—in pairings of men and women: Harriet Wilson and Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Fern and Walt Whitman, and Rebecca Harding Davis and Herman Melville—engaged with and transformed the book market. What were their critiques of the capitalism that was transforming the world around them? How did they respond to the changing marketplace that came to define their very success as authors? How was the role of women influenced by these conditions?

Capital Letters concludes with a fascinating and daring transhistorical comparison of how two superstar authors—Herman Melville in the nineteenth century and Stephen King today—have negotiated the shifty terrain of the literary marketplace. The result is an important contribution to our understanding of print culture and literary work.

[more]
cover of Capital at the Brink: Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism

Capital at the Brink

Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism

Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan, editors

Michigan Publishing Services, 2014

Capital at the Brink reveals the pervasiveness, destructiveness, and dominance of neoliberalism within American society and culture. The contributors to this collection also offer points of resistance to an ideology wherein, to borrow Henry Giroux’s comment, “everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit.” The first step in fighting neoliberalism is to make it visible. By discussing various inroads that it has made into political, popular, and literary culture, Capital at the Brink is taking this first step and joining a global resistance that works against neoliberalism by revealing the variety of ways in which it dominates and destroys various dimensions of our social and cultural life.
[more]
cover of Capital in the Nineteenth Century

Capital in the Nineteenth Century

Robert E. Gallman and Paul W. Rhode

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Gives permanence and context to Gallman’s influential economic research on growth theory.

When we think about history, we often think about people, events, ideas, and revolutions, but what about the numbers? What do the data tell us about what was, what is, and how things changed over time? Economist Robert E. Gallman (1926–98) gathered extensive data on US capital stock and created a legacy that has, until now, been difficult for researchers to access and appraise in its entirety.

Gallman measured American capital stock from a range of perspectives, viewing it as the accumulation of income saved and invested, and as an input into the production process. He used the level and change in the capital stock as proxy measures for long-run economic performance. Analyzing data in this way from the end of the US colonial period to the turn of the twentieth century, Gallman placed our knowledge of the long nineteenth century—the period during which the United States began to experience per capita income growth and became a global economic leader—on a strong empirical foundation. Gallman’s research was painstaking and his analysis meticulous, but he did not publish the material backing to his findings in his lifetime. Here Paul W. Rhode completes this project, giving permanence to a great economist’s insights and craftsmanship.  Gallman’s data speak to the role of capital in the economy, which lies at the heart of many of the most pressing issues today.
[more]
cover of Capital of Mind: The Idea of a Modern American University

Capital of Mind

The Idea of a Modern American University

Adam R. Nelson

University of Chicago Press, 2024

The second volume of an ambitious new economic history of American higher education.

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?
[more]
cover of Capital, Class & Technology in Contemporary American Culture: Projecting Post-Fordism

Capital, Class & Technology in Contemporary American Culture

Projecting Post-Fordism

Nick Heffernan

Pluto Press, 2000

In the tradition of Mike Davis and Fredric Jameson, Nick Heffernan engages in a series of meditations on capital, class and technology in contemporary America. 

He turns to the stories we generate and tell ourselves - via fiction, film journalism, theory - to see how change is registered. By investigating a variety of texts, he observes how structural change affects the way people organise their lives economically, socially and culturally. Case studies include Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, William Gibson's cyberspace trilogy, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World.

Using the links between narrative cultural forms and the process of historical understanding, he brings together debates that have so far been conducted largely within the separate domains of political economy, social theory and cultural criticism to provide a compelling analysis of contemporary cultural change. By relocating postmodernism in the context of changing modes of capitalism, Heffernan puts the question of class and class agency back at the centre of the critical agenda.
[more]
cover of Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare

Capital, State, Empire

The New American Way of Digital Warfare

Scott Timcke

University of Westminster Press, 2017

The United States presents the greatest source of global geo-political violence and instability. Guided by the radical political economy tradition, this book offers an analysis of the USA’s historical impulse to weaponize communication technologies.

Scott Timcke explores the foundations of this impulse and how the militarization of digital society creates structural injustices and social inequalities. He analyses how new digital communication technologies support American paramountcy and conditions for worldwide capital accumulation. Identifying selected features of contemporary American society, Capital, State, Empire undertakes a materialist critique of this digital society and of the New American Way of War. At the same time it demonstrates how the American security state represses activists—such as Black Lives Matter—who resist this emerging security leviathan. The book also critiques the digital positivism behind the algorithmic regulation used to control labour and further diminish prospects for human flourishing for the ‘99%’.

Capital, State, Empire contributes to a broader understanding of the dynamics of global capitalism and political power in the early 21st century.

[more]
cover of Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America

Capitalism Takes Command

The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America

Edited by Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America’s transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, Capitalism Takes Command presents a history of family farming, general incorporation laws, mortgage payments, inheritance practices, office systems, and risk management—an inventory of the means by which capitalism became America’s new revolutionary tradition.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past. As business ceaselessly revised its own practices, a new demographic of private bankers, insurance brokers, investors in securities, and start-up manufacturers, among many others, assumed center stage, displacing older elites and forms of property. Explaining how capital became an “ism” and how business became a political philosophy, Capitalism Takes Command brings the economy back into American social and cultural history.
[more]
cover of Capitalism and Christianity, American Style

Capitalism and Christianity, American Style

William E. Connolly

Duke University Press, 2008

Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s stirring call for the democratic left to counter the conservative stranglehold over American religious and economic culture in order to put egalitarianism and ecological integrity on the political agenda. An eminent political theorist known for his work on identity, secularism, and pluralism, Connolly charts the path of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” source of a bellicose ethos reverberating through contemporary institutional life. He argues that the vengeful vision of the Second Coming motivating a segment of the evangelical right resonates with the ethos of greed animating the cowboy sector of American capitalism. The resulting evangelical-capitalist ethos finds expression in church pulpits, Fox News reports, the best-selling Left Behind novels, consumption practices, investment priorities, and state policies. These practices resonate together to diminish diversity, forestall responsibility to future generations, ignore urban poverty, and support a system of extensive economic inequality.

Connolly describes how the evangelical-capitalist machine works, how its themes resound across class lines, and how it infiltrates numerous aspects of American life. Proposing changes in sensibility and strategy to challenge this machine, Connolly contends that the liberal distinction between secular public and religious private life must be reworked. Traditional notions of unity or solidarity must be translated into drives to forge provisional assemblages comprised of multiple constituencies and creeds. The left must also learn from the political right how power is infused into everyday institutions such as the media, schools, churches, consumption practices, corporations, and neighborhoods. Connolly explores the potential of a “tragic vision” to contest the current politics of existential resentment and political hubris, explores potential lines of connection between it and theistic faiths that break with the evangelical right, and charts the possibility of forging an “eco-egalitarian” economy. Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s most urgent work to date.

[more]
cover of Capitalism and Freedom

Capitalism and Freedom

Milton Friedman

University of Chicago Press, 1963

In the classic bestseller, Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman presents his view of the proper role of competitive capitalism—the organization of economic activity through private enterprise operating in a free market—as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom. Beginning with a discussion of principles of a liberal society, Friedman applies them to such constantly pressing problems as monetary policy, discrimination, education, income distribution, welfare, and poverty.

"Milton Friedman is one of the nation's outstanding economists, distinguished for remarkable analytical powers and technical virtuosity. He is unfailingly enlightening, independent, courageous, penetrating, and above all, stimulating."-Henry Hazlitt, Newsweek

"It is a rare professor who greatly alters the thinking of his professional colleagues. It's an even rarer one who helps transform the world. Friedman has done both."-Stephen Chapman, Chicago Tribune
[more]
cover of Capitalism and Freedom

Capitalism and Freedom

Milton Friedman

University of Chicago Press, 2020

One of TIME magazine’s All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books
One of Times Literary Supplement’s 100 Most Influential Books Since the War
One of National Review’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Century
​One of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 50 Best Books of the 20th Century


How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat it poses to individual freedom? In this classic book, Milton Friedman provides the definitive statement of an immensely influential economic philosophy—one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.
​
First published in 1962, Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom is one of the most significant works of economic theory ever written. Enduring in its eminence and esteem, it has sold nearly a million copies in English, has been translated into eighteen languages, and continues to inform economic thinking and policymaking around the world. This new edition includes prefaces written by Friedman for both the 1982 and 2002 reissues of the book, as well as a new foreword by Binyamin Appelbaum, lead economics writer for the New York Times editorial board.
[more]
cover of Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition

Capitalism and Freedom

Fortieth Anniversary Edition

Milton Friedman

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Selected by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war"

How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat it poses to individual freedom? In this classic book, Milton Friedman provides the definitive statement of his immensely influential economic philosophy—one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom. The result is an accessible text that has sold well over half a million copies in English, has been translated into eighteen languages, and shows every sign of becoming more and more influential as time goes on.
[more]