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Designed to showcase current issues of interest, Pennsylvania Politics and Policy, Volume 2 isthe second reader consisting of updated chapters from recent issues of Commonwealth: A Journal of Pennsylvania Politics and Policy. The editors and contributors to this volume focus on government institutions, election laws, the judiciary, government finance and budgeting, the opioid crisis, childcare, property taxes, environmental policy, demographics, and more. Each chapter is supplemented by discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and forums with arguments in support of or opposed to contested elements of state policy.

In addition, Pennsylvania Politics and Policy, Volume 2 includes a detailed guide to researching state government and policy online, as well as a comprehensive chapter on the structure of Pennsylvania government. It is designed as a text or supplement for college or advanced high school classes in American government, state and local politics, public policy, and public administration. 

Contributors include: John Arway, Jenna Becker Kane, Jeffrey Carroll, Bob Dick, Ashley Harden, Stefanie I. Kasparek, Vera Krekanova, Maureen W. McClure, John F. McDonald, Josh Shapiro, Marc Stier, Jennie Sweet-Cushman, James Vike, and the editors.

Volume 2 of this critical edition includes the translation of Volumes 3 and 4 of the second, revised French edition of Alexander von Humboldt’s Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827 as well as notes, supplements, indexes, and more.
 
Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain—the first modern regional economic and political geography—covers his travels across today’s Mexico in 1803–1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony.
 
To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies.
 
This two-volume critical edition—the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.
 

Political and Social Writings:Volume 2, 1955–1960 was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

A series of writings by the man who inspired the students of the Workers' Rebellion in May of 1968.

"Given the rapid pace of change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the radical nature of these transformations, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, a consistent and radical critic of Soviet Marxism, gains renewed significance....these volumes are instructive because they enable us to trace his rigorous engagement with the project of socialist construction from his break with Trotskyism to his final breach with Marxism. . . and would be read with profit by all those seeking to comprehend the historical originality of events in the USSR and Eastern Europe." –Contemporary Sociology

Possibility and Necessity was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This two-volume work—Jean Piaget's last—was published in France in 1981 and 1983 and is available now for the first time in English translation. Reflecting the preoccupations and methodologies of his later years, Possibility and Necessity combines theoretical interpretation with detailed summaries of the experiments Piaget and his colleagues used to test their hypotheses.

Volume 2 presents a series of experiments documenting the way children between the ages of four or five and eleven to thirteen come to develop a grasp of necessity and its role in understanding the world about them. The experiments show how children proceed from an initial level (at four or five years) of pseudo-necessities, where they see the world as necessarily what it appears to be without the existence of other possibilities, to an intermediate level (at six to ten years), where pseudo-necessities give way to increasingly rich arrays of possibilities, and a final stage (at eleven to thirteen years), where children are able to select among these multiple possibilities the one that fits all the data. This stage represents the optimal level of understanding reality, which is now seen by the child as infinitely variable yet coherent and lawful. Psychologically, this lawfulness corresponds to a sense of necessity, or certainty.

Volume 2 thus completes the theory presented in Volume 1 (The Role of Possibility in Cognitive Development) by showing how cognitive development is mediated on the one hand by a dialectical process of ever-expanding possibilities and, on the other, by increasingly delimiting necessities. In demonstrating how this process operates in psychological development—and in pointing out analogies in the history of science — Piaget gave his genetic epistemology its final and most accomplished form. The acquisition of knowledge is thus shown to be the result of two complementary processes: the formation of possibilities and the grasping of necessary laws and constraints in the construction of a reasoned representation of the external world.

As important to modern world views as any work of Darwin, Marx, or Freud, Lyell's Principles of Geology has never before been available in paperback. In the second of three volumes, Lyell (1797-1875) continues his uniformitarian argument of Volume I—the physical features of the earth are endlessly fluctuating around a stable mean—but focuses on organic rather than inorganic processes. Volume II is widely known because of its influence on Darwin, who took the book on his famous Beagle voyage and was stimulated by Lyell's extensive treatment of biological history and diversity.