216 books match the query 'Social' and 7 start with j

cover of Jane Addams in the Classroom

Jane Addams in the Classroom

Edited by David Schaafsma

University of Illinois Press, 2014

Once intent on being good to people, Jane Addams later dedicated herself to the idea of being good with people, establishing mutually-responsive and reciprocal relationships with those she served at Hull House. The essays in Jane Addams in the Classroom explore how Addams's life, work, and philosophy provide invaluable lessons for teachers seeking connection with their students.

Balancing theoretical and practical considerations, the collection examines Addams's emphasis on listening to and learning from those around her and encourages contemporary educators to connect with students through innovative projects and teaching methods. In the first essays, Addams scholars lay out how her narratives drew on experience, history, and story to explicate theories she intended as guides to practice. Six teacher-scholars then establish Addams's ongoing relevance by connecting her principles to exciting events in their own classrooms. An examination of the Jane Addams Children's Book Award and a fictional essay on Addams's work and ideas round out the volume.

Accessible and wide-ranging, Jane Addams in the Classroom offers inspiration for educators while adding to the ongoing reconsideration of Addams's contributions to American thought.

Contributors include Todd DeStigter, Lanette Grate, Susan Griffith, Lisa Junkin, Jennifer Krikava, Lisa Lee, Petra Munro, Bridget O'Rourke, David Schaafsma, Beth Steffen, Darren Tuggle, Erin Vail, and Ruth Vinz.

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cover of Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing: Constructing “Democracy and Social Ethics”

Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing

Constructing “Democracy and Social Ethics”

Marilyn Fischer

University of Chicago Press, 2019

In Jane Addams’s Evolutionary Theorizing, Marilyn Fischer advances the bold and original claim that Addams’s reasoning in her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics, is thoroughly evolutionary. While Democracy and Social Ethics, a foundational text of classical American pragmatism, is praised for advancing a sensitive and sophisticated method of ethical deliberation, Fischer is the first to explore its intellectual roots.
 
Examining essays Addams wrote in the 1890s and showing how they were revised for Democracy and Social Ethics, Fischer draws from philosophy, history, literature, rhetoric, and more to uncover the array of social evolutionary thought Addams engaged with in her texts—from British socialist writings on the evolution of democracy to British and German anthropological accounts of the evolution of morality. By excavating Addams’s evolutionary reasoning and rhetorical strategies, Fischer reveals the depth, subtlety, and richness of Addams’s thought.
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cover of Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present

Japan After Japan

Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present

Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian, eds.

Duke University Press, 2006

The prolonged downturn in the Japanese economy that began during the recessionary 1990s triggered a complex set of reactions both within Japan and abroad, reshaping not only the country’s economy but also its politics, society, and culture. In Japan After Japan, scholars of history, anthropology, literature, and film explore the profound transformations in Japan since the early 1990s, providing complex analyses of a nation in transition, linking its present to its past and connecting local situations to global developments.

Several of the essayists reflect on the politics of history, considering changes in the relationship between Japan and the United States, the complex legacy of Japanese colonialism, Japan’s chronic unease with its wartime history, and the postwar consolidation of an ethnocentric and racist nationalism. Others analyze anxieties related to the role of children in society and the weakening of the gendered divide between workplace and home. Turning to popular culture, contributors scrutinize the avid consumption of “real events” in formats including police shows, quiz shows, and live Web camera feeds; the creation, distribution, and reception of Pokémon, the game-based franchise that became a worldwide cultural phenomenon; and the ways that the behavior of zealous fans of anime both reinforces and clashes with corporate interests. Focusing on contemporary social and political movements, one essay relates how a local citizens’ group pressed the Japanese government to turn an international exposition, the Aichi Expo 2005, into a more environmentally conscious project. Another essay offers both a survey of emerging political movements and a manifesto identifying new possibilities for radical politics in Japan. Together the contributors to Japan After Japan present much-needed insight into the wide-ranging transformations of Japanese society that began in the 1990s.

Contributors. Anne Allison, Andrea G. Arai, Eric Cazdyn, Leo Ching, Harry Harootunian, Marilyn Ivy, Sabu Kohso, J. Victor Koschmann, Thomas LaMarre, Masao Miyoshi, Yutaka Nagahara, Naoki Sakai, Tomiko Yoda, Yoshimi Shunya, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

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cover of John Williams Walker: A Study in the Political, Social, and Cultural Life of the Old Southwest

John Williams Walker

A Study in the Political, Social, and Cultural Life of the Old Southwest

Hugh C. Bailey

University of Alabama Press, 1964

    A biography of Alabama’s first Senator, this book is also the fascinating story of Southern frontier life as portrayed in contemporary letters and documents. When Madison County, Alabama, was still wilderness, Walker trekked across the mountains from Georgia with his bride, Matilda Pope, his slaves, and all his household possessions, to build a plantation near Huntsville. Here he began his extraordinary political career: member of the first territorial legislature; speaker of the house in the second; U.S. territorial judge; president of Alabama’s Constitutional Convention; and when statehood was won, first U.S. Senator.

    Though his term in the Senate was cut short by illness, resignation, and death, in the four years he served, he met head-on the most controversial issues of his day—the Missouri Compromise, acquisition of Florida, and land relief legislation. It was in land relief that he made his most significant contribution, for he fathered the 1821 Land Law upon which new public-lands legislation for a decade thereafter was based. His own state wildly acclaimed him upon its passage; other frontier states had good reason to make him the public hero he became. But a year later, at 40, he was dead of tuberculosis.

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cover of Just Hear Me Out: How to Change Minds Without Lies, Bullshit, or Moral Compromise

Just Hear Me Out

How to Change Minds Without Lies, Bullshit, or Moral Compromise

Colin Marshall

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A guide to persuasion for people who want to change minds without manipulation or coercion.

Most of us have given up on persuasion. We say our problems are too pressing, people are too polarized, and success is too dubious—and it’s true! After all, when was the last time you heard someone actually change their mind? To improve our persuasive powers, self-help books often ask us to stoop to dishonest, manipulative tricks that rarely achieve lasting results. But perhaps there is a way to persuade people that is neither hopelessly misguided nor morally suspect.

In Just Hear Me Out, philosopher Colin Marshall describes a persuasive method that is both effective and ethical. Rather than share a flurry of tips for how to win friends and influence people, Marshall invites us to take up persuasion as fundamentally civil work, good both for our conscience and our communities. Real-world persuaders such as Jane Addams, Daryl Davis, and Fred Rogers show us an ethical route, he argues, to changing hearts through patience, respect, and compassion.

Accessible, practical, and buoyed by hope, Just Hear Me Out offers a powerful method for all who want to persuade others but aren’t interested in winning at any cost. When it works, people don’t just change their minds; they discover anew how to value our common humanity.

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cover of Just Hear Me Out: How to Change Minds Without Lies, Bullshit, or Moral Compromise

Just Hear Me Out

How to Change Minds Without Lies, Bullshit, or Moral Compromise

Colin Marshall

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A guide to persuasion for people who want to change minds without manipulation or coercion.

Most of us have given up on persuasion. We say our problems are too pressing, people are too polarized, and success is too dubious—and it’s true! After all, when was the last time you heard someone actually change their mind? To improve our persuasive powers, self-help books often ask us to stoop to dishonest, manipulative tricks that rarely achieve lasting results. But perhaps there is a way to persuade people that is neither hopelessly misguided nor morally suspect.

In Just Hear Me Out, philosopher Colin Marshall describes a persuasive method that is both effective and ethical. Rather than share a flurry of tips for how to win friends and influence people, Marshall invites us to take up persuasion as fundamentally civil work, good both for our conscience and our communities. Real-world persuaders such as Jane Addams, Daryl Davis, and Fred Rogers show us an ethical route, he argues, to changing hearts through patience, respect, and compassion.

Accessible, practical, and buoyed by hope, Just Hear Me Out offers a powerful method for all who want to persuade others but aren’t interested in winning at any cost. When it works, people don’t just change their minds; they discover anew how to value our common humanity.

[more]
cover of Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

Juvenescence

A Cultural History of Our Age

Robert Pogue Harrison

University of Chicago Press, 2014

How old are you?  The more thought you bring to bear on the question, the harder it is to answer.  For we age simultaneously in different ways: biologically, psychologically, socially. And we age within the larger framework of a culture, in the midst of a history that predates us and will outlast us. Looked at through that lens, many aspects of late modernity would suggest that we are older than ever, but Robert Pogue Harrison argues that we are also getting startlingly younger—in looks, mentality, and behavior. We live, he says, in an age of juvenescence.
 
Like all of Robert Pogue Harrison's books, Juvenescence ranges brilliantly across cultures and history, tracing the ways that the spirits of youth and age have inflected each other from antiquity to the present. Drawing on the scientific concept of neotony, or the retention of juvenile characteristics through adulthood, and extending it into the cultural realm, Harrison argues that youth is essential for culture’s innovative drive and flashes of genius. At the same time, however, youth—which Harrison sees as more protracted than ever—is a luxury that requires the stability and wisdom of our elders and the institutions. “While genius liberates the novelties of the future,” Harrison writes, “wisdom inherits the legacies of the past, renewing them in the process of handing them down.”
 
A heady, deeply learned excursion, rich with ideas and insights, Juvenescence could only have been written by Robert Pogue Harrison. No reader who has wondered at our culture's obsession with youth should miss it.
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