173 books match the query 'Origins' and 49 start with t

cover of The Alabama Folk Lyric: A Study in Origins and Media of Dissemination

The Alabama Folk Lyric

A Study in Origins and Media of Dissemination

Collected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ray B. Browne

University of Wisconsin Press, 1979

Alabamians have always been a singing people. The settlers who moved into the various sections of the state brought with them songs which reflected their national origins and geographical backgrounds, and as they spread into the hills and over the lowlands they created new songs out of the conditions under which they lived. Also, they absorbed songs from outside sources whenever these pieces could be adapted to their sentiments and ways of life. Thus, by a process of memory, composition and recreation they developed a rich body of folk songs. The following collection a part of the effort to discover and preserve these songs.

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cover of The Arc of War: Origins, Escalation, and Transformation

The Arc of War

Origins, Escalation, and Transformation

Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In this far-reaching exploration of the evolution of warfare in human history, Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson provide insight into the perennial questions of why and how humans fight. Beginning with the origins of warfare among foraging groups, The Arc of War draws on a wealth of empirical data to enhance our understanding of how war began and how it has changed over time. The authors point to the complex interaction of political economy, political and military organization, military technology, and the threat environment—all of which create changing incentives for states and other actors. They conclude that those actors that adapt survive, and those that do not are eliminated. In modern times, warfare between major powers has become exceedingly costly and therefore quite rare, while lesser powers are too weak to fight sustained and decisive wars or to prevent internal rebellions.
 
Conceptually innovative and historically sweeping, The Arc of War represents a significant contribution to the existing literature on warfare.
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cover of The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism

The Best Effect

Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism

Ryan Darr

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A theological history of consequentialism and a fresh agenda for teleological ethics.
 

Consequentialism—the notion that we can judge an action by its effects alone—has been among the most influential approaches to ethics and public policy in the Anglophone world for more than two centuries. In The Best Effect, Ryan Darr argues that consequentialist ethics is not as secular or as rational as it is often assumed to be. Instead, Darr describes the emergence of consequentialism in the seventeenth century as a theological and cosmological vision and traces its intellectual development and eventual secularization across several centuries. The Best Effect reveals how contemporary consequentialism continues to bear traces of its history and proposes in its place a more expansive vision for teleological ethics.
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cover of The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right

The Conservative Frontier

Texas and the Origins of the New Right

Jeff Roche

University of Texas Press, 2025

2026 Al Lowman Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)
2026 Bonney MacDonald Outstanding Book Award Winner, Center for the Study of the American West at West Texas A&M University (CSAW)

How West Texas business and culture molded the rise of conservatism in the United States.

Much of what we understand as modern American political conservatism was born in West Texas, where today it predominates. How did the people of such a vast region—larger than New England and encompassing big cities like Lubbock and Amarillo, as well as tiny towns from Anson to Dalhart—develop such a uniform political culture? And why and how did it go national?

Jeff Roche finds answers in the history of what he calls cowboy conservatism. Political power players matter in this story, but so do football coaches, newspaper editors, and a breakfast cereal tycoon who founded a capitalist utopia. The Conservative Frontier follows these and other figures as they promoted an ideology grounded in the entrepreneurial and proto-libertarian attitudes of nineteenth-century Texas ranchers, including a fierce devotion to both individualism and small-town notions of community responsibility. This political sensibility was in turn popularized by its association with the mythology and iconography of the cowboy as imagined in twentieth-century mass media. By the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, Roche shows, it was clear that the cowboy conservatism of West Texas had set the stage for the emergence of the New Right—the more professionalized and tech-savvy operation that dominated national conservative politics for the next quarter century.

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cover of The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought

The First Moderns

Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought

William R. Everdell

University of Chicago Press, 1997

A lively and accessible history of Modernism, The First Moderns is filled with portraits of genius, and intellectual breakthroughs, that richly evoke the fin-de-siècle atmosphere of Paris, Vienna, St. Louis, and St. Petersburg. William Everdell offers readers an invigorating look at the unfolding of an age.

"This exceptionally wide-ranging history is chock-a-block with anecdotes, factoids, odd juxtapositions, and useful insights. Most impressive. . . . For anyone interested in learning about late 19th- and early 20th- century imaginative thought, this engagingly written book is a good place to start."—Washington Post Book World

"The First Moderns brilliantly maps the beginning of a path at whose end loom as many diasporas as there are men."—Frederic Morton, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"In this truly exciting study of the origins of modernist thought, poet and teacher Everdell roams freely across disciplinary lines. . . . A brilliant book that will prove useful to scholars and generalists for years to come; enthusiastically recommended."—Library Journal, starred review

"Everdell has performed a rare service for his readers. Dispelling much of the current nonsense about 'postmodernism,' this book belongs on the very short list of profound works of cultural analysis."—Booklist

"Innovative and impressive . . . [Everdell] has written a marvelous, erudite, and readable study."-Mark Bevir, Spectator

"A richly eclectic history of the dawn of a new era in painting, music, literature, mathematics, physics, genetics, neuroscience, psychiatry and philosophy."—Margaret Wertheim, New Scientist

"[Everdell] has himself recombined the parts of our era's intellectual history in new and startling ways, shedding light for which the reader of The First Moderns will be eternally grateful."—Hugh Kenner, The New York Times Book Review

"Everdell shows how the idea of "modernity" arose before the First World War by telling the stories of heroes such as T. S. Eliot, Max Planck, and Georges Serault with such a lively eye for detail, irony, and ambiance that you feel as if you're reliving those miraculous years."—Jon Spayde, Utne Reader

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cover of The GREAT DEBATE ON BANKING REFORM: Nelson Aldrich and the Origins of the Fed

The GREAT DEBATE ON BANKING REFORM

Nelson Aldrich and the Origins of the Fed

Elmus Wicker

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

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cover of The Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectal Interrelations

The Germanic Languages

Origins and Early Dialectal Interrelations

Hans Frede Nielsen

University of Alabama Press, 1989

A revised and translated version of De germanske sprog. Baggrund og gruppe'ring (Odense University Press, 1979), which has been out of print for several years

The book is especially concerned with the grouping of the Germanic languages: with the research history of this much-debated question and with a discussion of the methods applied to past attempts and indeed applicable to future research in the field.
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cover of The Iowa Writers' Workshop: origins, emergence & growth

The Iowa Writers' Workshop

origins, emergence & growth

Stephen Wilbers

University of Iowa Press, 1980

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cover of The Language of Planning: Essays on the Origins and Ends of American Planning Thought

The Language of Planning

Essays on the Origins and Ends of American Planning Thought

Albert Z. Guttenberg

University of Illinois Press, 1993

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cover of The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power

The Mormon Hierarchy

Origins of Power

D. Michael Quinn

Signature Books, 1994

 Converts to Joseph Smith’s 1828 restoration of primitive Christianity were attracted to the non-hierarchical nature of the movement. It was precisely because there were no priests, ordinances, or dogma that people joined in such numbers. Smith intended everyone to be a prophet, and anyone who felt called was invited to minister freely without formal office.

Not until seven years later did Mormons first learn that authority had been restored by angels or of the need for a hierarchy mirroring the Pauline model. That same year (1835) a Quorum of Twelve Apostles was organized, but their jurisdiction was limited to areas outside established stakes (dioceses). Stakes were led by a president, who oversaw spiritual development, and by a bishop, who supervised temporal needs.

At Smith’s martyrdom in 1844, the church had five leading quorums of authority. The most obvious successor to Smith, Illinois stake president William Marks, opposed the secret rites of polygamy, anointing, endowments, and the clandestine political activity that had characterized the church in Illinois. The secret Council of Fifty had recently ordained Smith as King on Earth and sent ambassadors abroad to form alliances against the United States.

The majority of church members knew nothing of these developments, but they followed Brigham Young, head of the Quorum of the Twelve, who spoke forcefully and moved decisively to eliminate contenders for the presidency. He continued to build on Smith’s political and doctrinal innovations and social stratification. Young’s twentieth-century legacy is a well-defined structure without the charismatic spontaneity or egalitarian chaos of the early church.

Historian D. Michael Quinn examines the contradictions and confusion of the first two tumultuous decades of LDS history. He demonstrates how events and doctrines were silently, retroactively inserted into the published form of scriptures and records to smooth out the stormy, haphazard development. The bureaucratization of Mormonism was inevitable, but the manner in which it occurred was unpredictable and will be, for readers, fascinating.

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cover of The Origins Of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring To The Breakup Of Czechoslovakia

The Origins Of Postcommunist Elites

From Prague Spring To The Breakup Of Czechoslovakia

Gil Eyal

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

How is it that Czechoslovakia’s separation into two countries in 1993 was accomplished so peacefully—especially when compared with the experiences of its neighbors Russia and Yugoslavia? This book provides a sociological answer to this question—and an empirical explanation for the breakup of Czechoslovakia—by tracing the political processes begun in the Prague Spring of 1968.

Gil Eyal’s main argument is that Czechoslovakia’s breakup was caused by a struggle between two fractions of what sociologists call the “new class,” which consisted primarily of intellectuals and technocrats. Focusing on the process of polarization that created these two distinct political elites, Eyal shows how, in response to the events of the ill-fated Prague Spring, Czech and Slovak members of the “new class” embarked on divergent paths and developed radically different, even opposed, identities, worldviews, and interests. Unlike most accounts of postcommunist nationalist conflict, this book suggests that what bound together each of these fractions—and what differentiated each from the other—were not national identities and nationalist sentiments per se, but their distinctive visions of the social role of intellectuals.

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cover of The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education

The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education

Patricia T. Haase

Duke University Press, 1990

The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education offers an analytical history of the beginnings and development of associate degree nursing (ADN) programs and the role of the caregivers it produces in the health care system. Nurses may be trained in two-, three-, or four-year programs, but all are eligible to take the accreditation examination to be licensed as registered nurses (RNs). The question of distinguishing between “professional” nurses from bachelor programs and “technical” nurses from the associate degree programs has become an important and controversial issue in nursing.
Advocates have long contended that the associate degree nurse is vital to the American health care system. This study, funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, confirms this view. In recent years the Foundation has invested more than $6.1 million in the development of the ADN, awarded by junior and community colleges. Many participants in the ADN projects for the Kellogg Foundation have noted that, despite the importance of the ADN and the controversy about its place in nursing education, the literature is scattered and hard to identity. The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education and the companion bibliography will provide much-needed information to educators, hospital and nursing administrators, nursing leaders, and public policy makers—all of whom must cope with the growing nursing shortage and increasingly difficult issues in health policy and administration.
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cover of The Origins of Agriculture: An International Perspective

The Origins of Agriculture

An International Perspective

Edited by C. Wesley Cowan and Patty Jo Watson

University of Alabama Press, 2006

The eight case studies in this book -- each a synthesis of available knowledge about the origins of agriculture in a specific region of the globe -- enable scholars in diverse disciplines to examine humanity's transition to agricultural societies. Contributors include: Gary W. Crawford, Robin W. Dennell, and Jack R. Harlan.

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cover of The Origins of Bioethics: Remembering When Medicine Went Wrong

The Origins of Bioethics

Remembering When Medicine Went Wrong

John A. Lynch

Michigan State University Press, 2019

The Origins of Bioethics argues that what we remember from the history of medicine and how we remember it are consequential for the identities of doctors, researchers, and patients in the present day. Remembering when medicine went wrong calls people to account for the injustices inflicted on vulnerable communities across the twentieth century in the name of medicine, but the very groups empowered to create memorials to these events often have a vested interest in minimizing their culpability for them. Sometimes these groups bury this past and forget events when medical research harmed those it was supposed to help. The call to bioethical memory then conflicts with a desire for “minimal remembrance” on the part of institutions and governments. The Origins of Bioethics charts this tension between bioethical memory and minimal remembrance across three cases—the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Study, and the Cincinnati Whole Body Radiation Study—that highlight the shift from robust bioethical memory to minimal remembrance to forgetting.
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cover of The Origins of Capitalism and the "Rise of the West"

The Origins of Capitalism and the "Rise of the West"

Eric H. Mielants

Temple University Press, 2008

In this study, Eric Mielants provides a novel interdisciplinary interpretation of the origins of modernity and capitalism in particular. He argues that contrary to popular thinking, the Rise of the West should not be analyzed in terms of the Industrial Revolution or the colonization of the New World, but viewed from long-term developments that occurred in the Middle Ages. A fascinating overview of different civilizations in East Asia, South Asia, and Northwestern Africa is provided and systematically compared and contrasted with Western Europe. This book addresses some of the major debates that have recently unfolded in world history, comparative sociology, political economy, sociological theory and historical sociology.  Mielants indicates how many existing theories (such as Marxism, World-Systems Theory and Smithian Modernization Theory) have suffered from either Eurocentric or limited temporal and spatial analyses, which prevents them from a complete understanding of why the origins of capitalism and citizenship emerged in Western Europe.
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cover of The Origins of Catholic Evolutionism, 1831-1950

The Origins of Catholic Evolutionism, 1831-1950

Kenneth W. Kemp

Catholic University of America Press, 2025

The history of the Catholic Church’s response to evolutionary biology has often been badly misrepresented as antagonistic. In fact, its response is better characterized as a long process of accommodation. This work is a comprehensive introduction to the work of the Catholic scientists and theologians who worked out the details of that accommodation. Few Catholics found the evolutionary origin of plant and animal species theologically objectionable. None thought that evolutionary processes provided a sufficient account of the origin of the first human beings. Catholics differed over whether those processes played a role in the origin of the first human body. Catholic evolutionism began with the work of four nineteenth-century scientists who might be called the pioneers of Catholic evolutionism—Belgian geologist Jean-Baptiste d’Omalius d’Halloy, English anatomist George Mivart, Italian anatomist Filippo De Filippi, and French paleontologist Albert Gaudry. The next generations of Catholic evolutionists, writing in the period from about 1890 -1940, included scientists (Jesuit entomologists Erich Wasmann and Felix Rüschkamp) as well as priests who focused more exclusively on the question of compatibility (Dalmace Leroy, John Zahm, Henry de Dorlodot, and Ernest Messenger). Among the scientists might also be included French paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who made some contributions to the general idea of the compatibility of evolutionary biology and Catholic theology, but who eventually veered off in the direction of a comprehensive evolutionary theology of nature the details of which are beyond the scope of this book. Catholic anti-evolutionists made efforts to have the Church prohibit works of Catholic evolutionism that, in their judgment gave evolutionary processes too great a rôle in the formation of the human body or that relied on problematic principles of hermeneutics. Efforts on the former front were eventually blocked by Pope Pius XI. The first magisterial statement on the question came, however, only in 1950, with Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis, which provisionally declared the orthodoxy of evolutionary accounts of the origin of the human body. In addition to providing details about Catholic evolutionists and the magisterium, the book also reviews the treatment of the new ideas in Catholic encyclopedias, periodicals, and textbooks. Although written in the first instance as a work of scholarship, the book was also written with attention to the needs of scientists, priests, and members of the general public who are interested in the question.
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cover of The Origins of Catholic Words: A Discursive Dictionary

The Origins of Catholic Words

A Discursive Dictionary

Anthony Lo Bello

Catholic University of America Press, 2020

The study of the vocabulary of the Catholic religion may be taken as a definition of the liberal arts. Origins of Catholic Words is a work of reference organized like a lexicon or encyclopedia. There is an entry for each word of importance having to do with the Catholic Church. Anthony Lo Bello gives the etymology of the word, describes what it means, and then adds whatever further discussion he feels is needed; in some cases this amounts to several pages. Lo Bello has assembled, over a number of years, lucid and wide-ranging remarks on the etymology and history of the words that occur in the study of the Catholic religion. A true labor of love, this sophisticated, one-of-a-kind dictionary will delight those who take pleasure in learning. Anyone interested in words and language—indeed, in culture, will find something interesting on every page. This is a book one may read and not just consult. The author has been ecumenical in his choice of authorities. J. B. Bury, Lord Chesterfield, Mandell Creighton, S. R. Driver, Ferdinand Gregorovius, Dr. Johnson, Henry Charles Lea, Bishop Lightfoot, Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, Henry Hart Milman, Leopold von Ranke, and Bertrand Russell find their places alongside Alban Butler, Denzinger, Ignaz Döllinger the Abbé Duchesne, Adrian Fortescue, Bishop Hefele, Cardinal Gasparri, Msgr. Ronald Knox, Msgr. Horace K. Mann, John Henry Newman, Ludwig von Pastor, Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward, and Evelyn Waugh. There have been many changes in the Catholic Church since 1962, and one of the goals of this book is to describe what will soon be missing from the memories of all living people. Origins of Catholic Words may, Lo Bello hopes, make its small contribution so that the situation not arise, which would convict Newman of error when he wrote, “What the Catholic Church once has had, she never has lost.”
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cover of The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany

The Origins of Christian Democracy

Politics and Confession in Modern Germany

Maria D. Mitchell

University of Michigan Press, 2012

This book is a pioneering contribution to the history of the founding of the West German political system after the Second World War. The political cooperation between Catholics and Protestants that resulted in the formation of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in occupied and early West Germany represented a significant change from a long history of hostility in confessional relations. Given that the CDU went on to dominate politics in West Germany well into the 1960s, Maria D. Mitchell argues that an understanding of what made this interconfessional party possible is crucial to an exploration of German history in the postwar period. She examines the political history of party formation as well as the religious beliefs and motivations that shaped the party's philosophy and positions. She provides an authoritative guide to the complex processes of maneuvering and negotiation that produced the CDU during 1945-46. The full range of political possibilities is discussed, including the suppressed alternatives to the Adenauer/Erhard axis that eventually defined the party's trajectory during the 1950s and the abortive Christian Socialism associated with Jacob Kaiser.

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cover of The Origins of Cool in Postwar America

The Origins of Cool in Postwar America

Joel Dinerstein

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change.

Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool.

This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.
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cover of The Origins of Free Verse

The Origins of Free Verse

H. T. Kirby-Smith

University of Michigan Press, 1998

H. T. Kirby-Smith offers a far-ranging and intellectually engaging study of the literary history of the debated genre of free verse, aimed not at perpetuating a particular dispute but instead at discovering the generative points of this often celebrated, often maligned form.
Though free verse became a dominant poetic mode only in the twentieth century, Kirby-Smith finds its roots in seventeenth-century England. Beginning his study with writers such as John Milton--who was considered by T. S. Eliot to be the greatest writer of free verse in English--the author places recent and divisive topics in poetics in context, showing them to be attenuated remnants of issues first broached hundreds of years ago.
The book seeks to establish a consensus on the nature of free verse, with reference to critics and poets including Pound, Eliot, Williams, Amy Lowell, Yvor Winters, and Hugh Kenner. Good free verse, argues Kirby-Smith, arises as a reaction to a well-established set of conventions. Likewise, The Origins of Free Verse goes against the conventions of existing poetic scholarship, offering an encompassing yet fresh--and controversial--literary history of free verse.
"At moments, this study is revelatory. . . . In its range and detail it offers a way of thinking about the history of English-language prosody which recognizes the importance of the poet's individual choices and undercuts our century's vanity. . . . Poetry is a learned art, and Kirby-Smith brings both insight and much learning to reading it." --Times Literary Supplement
"The best study of free verse I have seen. . . . The Origins of Free Verse is a book that all students of prosody will want to read. " --Harvard Review
". . . a witty and polemical account of the emergence and development of free verse." --Choice
H. T. Kirby-Smith is Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
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cover of The Origins of Human Diet and Medicine: Chemical Ecology

The Origins of Human Diet and Medicine

Chemical Ecology

Timothy Johns

University of Arizona Press, 1990

People have always been attracted to foods rich in calories, fat, and protein; yet the biblical admonition that meat be eaten “with bitter herbs” suggests that unpalatable plants play an important role in our diet. So-called primitive peoples show a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of how their bodies interact with plant chemicals, which may allow us to rediscover the origins of diet by retracing the paths of biology and culture.
 
The domestication of the potato serves as the focus of Timothy Johns’s interdisciplinary study, which forges a bold synthesis of ethnobotany and chemical ecology. The Aymara of highland Bolivia have long used varieties of potato containing potentially toxic levels of glycoalkaloids, and Johns proposes that such plants can be eaten without harm owing to human genetic modification and cultural manipulation. Drawing on additional fieldwork in Africa, he considers the evolution of the human use of plants, the ways in which humans obtain foods from among the myriad poisonous and unpalatable plants in the environment, and the consequences of this history for understanding the basis of the human diet. A natural corollary to his investigation is the origin of medicine, since the properties of plants that make them unpalatable and toxic are the same properties that make them useful pharmacologically.
 
As our species has adapted to the use of plants, plants have become an essential part of our internal ecology. Recovering the ancient wisdom regarding our interaction with the environment preserves a fundamental part of our human heritage.

Originally published in hardcover as With Bitter Herbs They Shall Eat It: Chemical Ecology and the Origins of Human Diet and Medicine
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cover of The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948: A Documentary History

The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948

A Documentary History

Eran Kaplan

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

In 1880 the Jewish community in Palestine encompassed some 20,000 Orthodox Jews; within sixty-five years it was transformed into a secular proto-state with well-developed political, military, and economic institutions, a vigorous Hebrew-language culture, and some 600,000 inhabitants. The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948: A Documentary History chronicles the making of modern Israel before statehood, providing in English the texts of original sources (many translated from Hebrew and other languages) accompanied by extensive introductions and commentaries from the volume editors.

This sourcebook assembles a diverse array of 62 documents, many of them unabridged, to convey the ferment, dissent, energy, and anxiety that permeated the Zionist project from its inception to the creation of the modern nation of Israel. Focusing primarily on social, economic, and cultural history rather than Zionist thought and diplomacy, the texts are organized in themed chapters. They present the views of Zionists from many political and religious camps, factory workers, farm women, militants, intellectuals promoting the Hebrew language and arts—as well as views of ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists. The volume includes important unabridged documents from the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict that are often cited but are rarely read in full. The editors, Eran Kaplan and Derek J. Penslar, provide both primary texts and informative notes and commentary, giving readers the opportunity to encounter voices from history and make judgments for themselves about matters of world-historical significance.


Best Special Interest Books, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
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cover of The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy: Development and Technology in Asia from 1540 to the Pacific War

The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy

Development and Technology in Asia from 1540 to the Pacific War

Christopher Howe

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Synthesizing a wide range of scholarship Christopher Howe traces the history of Japanese trade over four centuries and locates the sources of Japan's current commercial and financial strength in events that began in the sixteenth century.

"Thoughtful, well-organized, and lucidly written and reflects many years of painstaking research in different literatures."—Business Horizons

"The best analysis yet in English of the role of technology in Japan's emergence as a global economic power."—David J. Jeremy, Technology and Culture

"An important addition to Japanese economic history and the concept of creating relative advantage in trade."—Richard Rice, Journal of Asian Studies

"No other work in English approaches Christopher Howe's combination of a sweeping historical perspective with a comprehensive yet in-depth analysis of factors underlying Japan's pre-1940 economic 'miracle.' . . . [An] illuminating study."—Steven J. Ericson, American Historical Review
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cover of The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

The Origins of Mexican Catholicism

Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Osvaldo F. Pardo

University of Michigan Press, 2004

"Pardo's study provides a persuasive criticism of the widespread assumption that the process of Christianization in Mexico can be conceived as the imposition of a complete and fool-proof system that did not accept doubts or compromises. The Origins of Mexican Catholicism will become an invaluable tool for future researchers and enrich future debates on the subject."
---Fernando Cervantes, Bristol University, UK

"Pardo does an excellent job of balancing and contrasting sixteenth-century Catholic theology with Nahua thought and belief."
---John F. Schwaller, University of Minnesota


At first glance, religious conversion may appear to be only a one-way street. When studying sixteenth-century Mexico, one might assume that colonial coercion was the driving force behind the religious conversion of the native population. But The Origins of Mexican Catholicism shows how Spanish missionaries instead drew on existing native ceremonies in order to make Christianity more accessible to the Nahua population whom they were trying to convert.

Osvaldo F. Pardo explains that religious figures not only shaped native thought, but that indigenous rituals had an impact on the religion itself. This work illustrates the complex negotiations that took place in the process of making the Christian sacraments available to the native peoples, and at the same time, forced the missionaries to reexamine the meaning of their sacraments through the eyes of an alien culture.

For Spanish missionaries, ritual not only became a focus of evangelical concern but also opened a window to the social world of the Nahuas. Missionaries were able to delve into the Nahua's notions of self, emotions, and social and cosmic order. By better understanding the sociological aspects of Nahua culture, Christians learned ways to adequately convey their religion through mutual understanding instead of merely colonial oppression.

Given its interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to specialists in Latin American intellectual and literary history, the history of religion, and anthropology, and to anyone interested in cross-cultural processes.
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cover of The Origins of Modern Environmental Thought

The Origins of Modern Environmental Thought

J. Edward de Steiguer

University of Arizona Press, 2006

The Origins of Modern Environmental Thought provides readers with a concise and lively introduction to the seminal thinkers who created the modern environmental movement and inspired activism and policy change. Beginning with a brief overview of the works of Thoreau, Mill, Malthus, Leopold, and others, de Steiguer examines some of the earliest philosophies that underlie the field. He then describes major socioeconomic factors in post–World War II America that created the milieu in which the modern environmental movement began, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The following chapters offer summaries and critical reviews of landmark works by scholars who helped shape and define modern environmentalism.

Among others, de Steiguer examines works by Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, Kenneth Boulding, Garrett Hardin, Herman Daly, and Arne Naess. He describes the growth of the environmental movement from 1962 to 1973 and explains a number of factors that led to a decline in environmental interest during the mid-1970s. He then reveals changes in environmental awareness in the 1980s and concludes with commentary on the movement through 2004. Updated and revised from The Age of Environmentalism, this expanded edition includes three new chapters on Stewart Udall, Roderick Nash, and E. F. Schumacher, as well as a new concluding chapter, bibliography, and updated material throughout. This primer on the history and development of environmental consciousness and the many modern scholars who have shaped the movement will be useful to students in all branches of environmental studies and philosophy, as well as biology, economics, and physics.
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cover of The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy

The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy

M. B. B. Biskupski

Ohio University Press, 2010

The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy is a series of closely integrated essays that traces the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. It begins with the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland, and continues through changes that marked the postcommunist era of free Poland.

The idea of democracy survived in Poland through long periods of foreign occupation, the trials of two world wars, and years of Communist subjugation. Whether in Poland itself or among exiles, Polish speculation about the creation of a liberal-democratic Poland has been central to modern Polish political thought. This volume is unique in that is traces the evolution of the idea of democracy, both during the periods when Poland was an independent country—1918-1939—and during the periods of foreign occupation before 1918 through World War II and the Communist era. For those periods when Poland was not free, the volume discusses how the idea of democracy evolved among exile and underground Polish circles.

This important work is the only single-volume English-language history of modern Polish democratic thought and parliamentary systems and represents the latest scholarly research by leading specialists from Europe and North America.

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cover of The Origins of Russian Literary Theory: Folklore, Philology, Form

The Origins of Russian Literary Theory

Folklore, Philology, Form

Jessica Merrill

Northwestern University Press, 2022

Russian Formalism is widely considered the foundation of modern literary theory. This book reevaluates the movement in light of the current commitment to rethink the concept of literary form in cultural-historical terms. Jessica Merrill provides a novel reconstruction of the intellectual historical context that enabled the emergence of Formalism in the 1910s. Formalists adopted a mode of thought Merrill calls the philological paradigm, a framework for thinking about language, literature, and folklore that lumped them together as verbal tradition. For those who thought in these terms, verbal tradition was understood to be inseparable from cultural history. Merrill situates early literary theories within this paradigm to reveal abandoned paths in the history of the discipline—ideas that were discounted by the structuralist and post-structuralist accounts that would emerge after World War II.

The Origins of Russian Literary Theory reconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. According to these theories, literary form is always a product of human psychology and cultural history. By recontextualizing Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism’s legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.
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cover of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood

The Origins of Scottish Nationhood

Neil Davidson

Pluto Press, 2000

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cover of The Origins of Self: An Anthropological Perspective

The Origins of Self

An Anthropological Perspective

Martin P. J. Edwardes

University College London, 2019

The Origins of Self explores the role selfhood plays in defining both human society and each individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialization and language, and the types of selves we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. Martin P. J. Edwardes argues that other-awareness is a relatively early evolutionary development, present throughout the primate clade and perhaps beyond, but self-awareness is a product of the sharing of social models, something only humans appear to do. The self of which we are aware is not something innate within us, it is a model of our self produced as a response to the models of us offered to us by other people. Edwardes proposes that human construction of selfhood involves seven different types of self. All but one of them are internally generated models, and the only nonmodel, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self. Developed in relation to a range of subject areas—linguistics, anthropology, genomics, and cognition, as well as sociocultural theory—The Origins of Self is of particular interest to students and researchers studying the origins of language, human origins in general, and the cognitive differences between human and other animal psychologies.
 
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cover of The Origins of Southern Sharecropping

The Origins of Southern Sharecropping

Edward Royce

Temple University Press, 1993

Vivid primary accounts of post-Civil War life by planters and freed slaves complement this study of the rise of southern sharecropping. Edward Royce employs both historical and sociological methods to probe the question of why slavery was replaced by sharecropping rather than by some other labor arrangement. His detailed analysis illuminates conflicts between labor and capital as one group struggles to preserve the plantation system while the other pursues a quest for land and autonomy.

Royce contends that southern sharecropping occurred through a "constriction of possibilities," that it was shaped by default rather than orchestrated by economic reconstruction by white landowners and black laborers.

Highlighting the conflict-ridden nature of the process of social change, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping includes rich descriptions of the plantation system and gang labor, the freed slaves' dream of forty acres and a mule, the black colonization movement, the Freedman's Bureau, and racial relations after the war.



In the series Labor and Social Change, edited by Paula Rayman and Carmen Sirianni.

[more]
cover of The Origins of Southwestern Agriculture

The Origins of Southwestern Agriculture

R. G. Matson

University of Arizona Press, 1991

Presents a new model for the origins of Basketmaker II culture based on the evolution of maize use, focusing on the changes in maize growing rather than on the changes in, or to, the people involved.
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cover of The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics: With a New Afterword

The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics

With a New Afterword

William B. Provine

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Tracing the development of population genetics through the writings of such luminaries as Darwin, Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, William B. Provine sheds light on this complex field as well as its bearing on other branches of biology.
[more]
cover of The Origins of Violence: Religion, History and Genocide

The Origins of Violence

Religion, History and Genocide

John Docker

Pluto Press, 2008

Genocide is commonly understood to be a terrible aberration in human behaviour, performed by evil, murderous regimes such as the Nazis and dictators like Suharto and Pinochet. John Docker argues that the roots of genocide go far deeper into human nature than most people realise.

Genocide features widely in the Bible, the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and debates about the Enlightenment. These texts are studied in depth to trace the origins of violence through time and across civilisations. Developing the groundbreaking work of Raphaël Lemkin, who invented the term 'genocide', Docker guides us from the dawn of agricultural society, through classical civilisation to the present, showing that violence between groups has been integral to all periods of history.

This revealing book will be of great interest to those wishing to understand the roots of genocide and why it persists in the modern age.

[more]
cover of The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucracy, and the Social Question, 1815-70

The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia

Conservatives, Bureaucracy, and the Social Question, 1815-70

Hermann Beck

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Prussia's social and political structure, institutions, and values were in many ways formative for German history after 1871. After unification Prussia accounted for roughly two-thirds of the empire's size and population, but its weight within Germany was even greater because Prussia in large part molded the German identity and shaped Germany's image abroad. The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia examines this Prussian/German identity. It investigates the complex traditions of ideas, institutions, and social policy measures that lay at the root of the conservative Prussian welfare state. The examination of the ideas and policies of Prussian officials brings out a peculiar welfare state mentality of benevolence and patriarchal concern, pervaded by authoritarian streaks, that was unique in nineteenth-century Europe. In addition, the study analyzes the historiographical implications of the question of continuity and discontinuity in German history. The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia is of interest to scholars and students of German history as well as to students of governmental social policy and of the workings of a welfare state. Hermann Beck is Associate Professor of History, University of Miami.
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cover of The Origins of the British Labour Party

The Origins of the British Labour Party

J.H. Stewart Reid

University of Minnesota Press, 1955

The Origins of the British Labour Party was first published in 1955. 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.

What were the social and economic forces in England that gave rise to the British Labour Party? How did the party function in its formative years? How does the British labor movement compare with its American counterpart? If American labor enters politics as a separate party, is it likely to adopt a program resembling the socialism of the British Party?

Professor Reid's detailed account of the origins and development of the British Labour Party lays the groundwork for answers to questions like these, questions that are pertinent to the social and political issues of America as well as England. Since the appearance of a body of organized labor is a phenomenon occasioned by the process of industrialization, and since that process began in Great Britain almost a century earlier than on the American continent, the student of labor politics may well ponder whether something similar to the British experience lies ahead for America.

Professor Reid describes the conditions that brought about a specifically labor party, tells how it was established, and traces its first 20 years as a parliamentary party. He shows that the party began as an alliance of diverse forces having in common only the conviction that neither the Liberal nor the Conservative party would tackle such issues as housing, minimum wages, or unemployment insurance. He makes clear that, in working to achieve these short-term goals, the varied elements that made up the party finally worked out the peculiar compromise on policy and philosophy that is the basis of the British Labour Party today.

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cover of The Origins of the Dual City: Housing, Race, and Redevelopment in Twentieth-Century Chicago

The Origins of the Dual City

Housing, Race, and Redevelopment in Twentieth-Century Chicago

Joel Rast

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Chicago is celebrated for its rich diversity, but, even more than most US cities, it is also plagued by segregation and extreme inequality. More than ever, Chicago is a “dual city,” a condition taken for granted by many residents. In this book, Joel Rast reveals that today’s tacit acceptance of rising urban inequality is a marked departure from the past. For much of the twentieth century, a key goal for civic leaders was the total elimination of slums and blight. Yet over time, as anti-slum efforts faltered, leaders shifted the focus of their initiatives away from low-income areas and toward the upgrading of neighborhoods with greater economic promise. As misguided as postwar public housing and urban renewal programs were, they were born of a long-standing reformist impulse aimed at improving living conditions for people of all classes and colors across the city—something that can’t be said to be a true priority for many policymakers today. The Origins of the Dual City illuminates how we normalized and became resigned to living amid stark racial and economic divides.
 
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cover of The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer

The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer

Donald Phillip Verene

Northwestern University Press, 2012

The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms marks the culmination of Donald Phillip Verene’s work on Ernst Cassirer and heralds a major step forward in the critical work on the twentieth-century philosopher. Verene argues that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms cannot be understood apart from a dialectic between the Kantian and Hegelian philosophy that lies within it. 

Verene takes as his departure point that Cassirer never wishes to argue Kant over Hegel. Instead he takes from each what he needs, realizing that philosophical idealism itself did not stop with Kant but developed to Hegel, and that much of what remains problematic in Kantian philosophy finds particular solutions in Hegel’s philosophy. Cassirer never replaces transcendental reflection with dialectical speculation, but he does transfer dialectic from a logic of illusion, that is, the form of thinking beyond experience as Kant conceives it in the Critique of Pure Reason, to a logic of consciousness as Hegel employs it in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cassirer rejects Kant’s thing-in-itself but he also rejects Hegel’s Absolute as well as Hegel’s conception of Aufhebung. Kant and Hegel remain the two main characters on his stage, but they are accompanied by a large secondary cast, with Goethe in the foreground. Cassirer not only contributes to Goethe scholarship, but in Goethe he finds crucial language to communicate his assertions. Verene introduces us to the originality of Cassirer’s philosophy so that we may find access to the riches it contains.
[more]
cover of The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600

The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600

Edited by Julius Kirshner

University of Chicago Press, 1996

The beginnings of the state in Europe is a central topic of contemporary historical research. The making of such early modern Italian regional states as Florence, the kingdom of Naples, Milan, and Venice exemplifies a decisive turn in the state tradition of Western Europe.

The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600 represents the best in American, British, and Italian scholarship and offers a valuable and critical overview of the key problems of the emergence of the state in Europe. Some of the topics covered include the political legitimacy of the aborning regional states, the changing legal culture, the conflict between church and state, the forces shaping public finances, and the creation of the Italian League.

The eight essays in this collection originally appeared in the Journal of Modern History. Contributors include Roberto Bizzocchi, Giorgio Chittolini, Trevor Dean, Riccardo Fubini, Elena Fasano Guarini, Aldo Mazzacane, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera. This volume will appeal to historians, historical sociologists, and historians of political thought.
[more]
cover of The Origins of the Welfare State: Women, Work, and the French Revolution

The Origins of the Welfare State

Women, Work, and the French Revolution

Lisa DiCaprio

University of Illinois Press, 2005

Women workers and the revolutionary origins of the modern welfare state

In May 1790, the French National Assembly created spinning workshops (ateliers de filature) for thousands of unemployed women in Paris. These ateliers disclose new aspects of the process which transformed Old Regime charity into revolutionary welfare initiatives characterized by secularization, centralization, and entitlements based on citizenship. This study is the first to examine women and the welfare state in its formative period at a time when modern concepts of human rights were elaborated.

In The Origins of the Welfare State, Lisa DiCaprio reveals how the women working in the ateliers, municipal welfare officials, and the national government vied to define the meaning of revolutionary welfare throughout the Revolution. Presenting demands for improved wages and working conditions to a wide array of revolutionary officials, the women workers exercised their rights as "passive citizens" capaciously and shaped the meanings of work, welfare, and citizenship. Looking backward to the Old Regime and forward to the nineteenth century, this study explores the interventionist spirit that characterized liberalism in the eighteenth century and serves as a bridge to the history of entitlements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

[more]
cover of The Pinochet Case: Origins, Progress and Implications

The Pinochet Case

Origins, Progress and Implications

Edited by Madeleine Davis

University of London Press, 2003

The 1998 arrest of Senator Augusto Pinochet in London, on the orders of a Spanish judge seeking his extradition for human rights crimes, made headlines all over the world. Part of a wider, ongoing attempt by human rights activists and lawyers to prosecute the crimes of Latin American military regimes, the case has important implications for national and international law and for politics, diplomacy, and democracy. This book brings together political scientists and lawyers from Latin America, the United States, Spain, and the UK to analyze the political and historical context of the case, its progress through the courts in the UK and Chile, its handling by national governments, and its political and legal implications, both national and international. Contributors include Alan Angell (St Antony's College, Oxford, UK), Alexandra Barahona de Brito (Instituto de Estudos Estrategicos e Internacionais and Universidade Moderna, Lisbon, Portugal), Francisco Bravo Lopez (Chilean Interior Ministry), Juan E.
Garces (1999 recipient of the Right Livelihood Award for his work in preparing the Pinochet case), Carlos Huneeus (CERC, Chile and Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile), Brian Loveman (San Diego State University, USA), Carlos Malamud (Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales y Estrategicos, Madrid, Spain), Antonio Remiro Brotons (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain), Naomi Roht-Arriaza (University of California, Hastings College of Law, USA), and Diana Woodhouse (Oxford Brookes University, UK).
[more]
cover of The Poet's Work: 29 Poets on the Origins and Practice of Their Art

The Poet's Work

29 Poets on the Origins and Practice of Their Art

Edited by Reginald Gibbons

University of Chicago Press, 1989

"This anthology brings together essays by 20th-century poets on their own art: some concern themselves with its deep sources and ultimate justifications; others deal with technique, controversies among schools, the experience behind particular poems. The great Modernists of most countries are presented here—Paul Valéry, Federico García Lorca, Boris Pasternak, Fernando Pessoa, Eugenio Montale, Wallace Stevens—as are a range of younger, less eminent figures from the English-speaking world: Seamus Heaney, Denise Levertov, Wendell Berry. . . . The reader will find here a lively debate over the individualistic and the communal ends served by poetry, and over other issues that divide poets: inspiration and craft; the use or the condemnation of science; traditional and 'organic' form."—Alan Williamson, New York Times Book Review

[more]
cover of The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova: Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention

The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova

Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention

Edited by Stephanie Sandler, Maria Khotimsky, Margarita Krimmel, and Oleg Novikov

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

Olga Sedakova stands out among contemporary Russian poets for the integrity, erudition, intellectual force, and moral courage of her writing. After years of flourishing quietly in the late Soviet underground, she has increasingly brought her considered voice into public debates to speak out for freedom of belief and for those who have been treated unjustly. This volume, the first collection of scholarly essays to treat her work in English, assesses her contributions as a poet and as a thinker, presenting far-reaching accounts of broad themes and patterns of thought across her writings as well as close readings of individual texts.

Essayists from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Italy, and the United States show how Sedakova has contributed to ongoing aesthetic and cultural debates. Like Sedakova's own work, the volume affirms the capacity of words to convey meaning and to change our understanding of life itself. The volume also includes dozens of elegant new translations of Sedakova's poems.
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cover of The Spice Ports: Mapping the Origins of Global Sea Trade

The Spice Ports

Mapping the Origins of Global Sea Trade

Nicholas Nugent

Brandeis University Press, 2024

A first-class narrative writer blends his unique cartographic and topographic understanding of the key ports of early seaborne commerce.
 
We may think of “globalism” as a recent development but its origins date back to the fifteenth century and beyond, when seafarers pioneered routes across the oceans with the objectives of exploration, trade, and profit.
 
These voyages only became possible after certain technical innovations—improvements in ship design, compasses, and mapping—enabled navigation across unprecedented distances. The mariners’ embarkation points were the vibrant ports of the West—Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon—and their destinations the exotic ports of the East—Malacca, Goa, Bombay—where they tracked down the elusive spices, so much in demand by Western palates.
 
This development of maritime communication brought benefits apart from culinary delights: the spread of ideas on art, literature, and science. But it was not necessarily beneficial for everyone concerned: colonial ambitions were often disastrous for local populations, who were frequently exploited as slave plantation labor.
 
This wide-ranging account of a fascinating period of global history uses original maps and contemporary artists’ views to tell the story of how each port developed individually while also encouraging us to consider contrasting points of view of the benefits and the damages of the maritime spice trade.
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cover of The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State

The Sympathetic State

Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State

Michele Landis Dauber

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Even as unemployment rates soared during the Great Depression, FDR’s relief and social security programs faced attacks in Congress and the courts on the legitimacy of federal aid to the growing population of poor. In response, New Dealers pointed to a long tradition—dating back to 1790 and now largely forgotten—of federal aid to victims of disaster. In The Sympathetic State, Michele Landis Dauber recovers this crucial aspect of American history, tracing the roots of the modern American welfare state beyond the New Deal and the Progressive Era back to the earliest days of the republic when relief was forthcoming for the victims of wars, fires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes.
 
Drawing on a variety of materials, including newspapers, legal briefs, political speeches, the art and literature of the time, and letters from thousands of ordinary Americans, Dauber shows that while this long history of government disaster relief has faded from our memory today, it was extremely well known to advocates for an expanded role for the national government in the 1930s, including the Social Security Act. Making this connection required framing the Great Depression as a disaster afflicting citizens though no fault of their own. Dauber argues that the disaster paradigm, though successful in defending the New Deal, would ultimately come back to haunt advocates for social welfare. By not making a more radical case for relief, proponents of the New Deal helped create the weak, uniquely American welfare state we have today—one torn between the desire to come to the aid of those suffering and the deeply rooted suspicion that those in need are responsible for their own deprivation.
 
Contrary to conventional thought, the history of federal disaster relief is one of remarkable consistency, despite significant political and ideological change. Dauber’s pathbreaking and highly readable book uncovers the historical origins of the modern American welfare state.
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cover of The War in Ukraine’s Donbas: Origins, Contexts, and the Future

The War in Ukraine’s Donbas

Origins, Contexts, and the Future

David R. Marples

Central European University Press, 2022

This collective work analyzes the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, providing a coherent picture of Ukraine and Eastern Europe in the period 2013–2020. Giving voice to different social groups, scholarly communities and agencies relevant to Ukraine’s recent history, The War in Ukraine's Donbas goes beyond simplistic media interpretations that limit the analysis to Vladimir Putin and Russian aims to annex Ukraine. Instead, the authors identify the deeper roots linked to the autonomy and history of Donbas as a region. The contributions explore local society and traditions and the alienation from Ukraine caused by the events of Euromaidan, which saw the removal of the Donetsk-based president Viktor Yanukovych. Other chapters address the refugee crisis, the Minsk Accords in 2014 and the impact of the new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his efforts to bring the war to an end by negotiations among Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany.

The book concludes with four proposals for a durable peace in Donbas: territorial power-sharing; the conversion of rebels into legitimate political parties; amnesty for all participants of the armed conflict; and a transitional period of several years until political institutions are fully re-established.

[more]
cover of This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games

This Great Symbol

Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games

John J. MacAloon

University of Chicago Press, 1981

[more]
cover of To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement

To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face

Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement

Robert H. Churchill

University of Michigan Press, 2011

After the bombings of Oklahoma City in 1995, most Americans were shocked to discover that tens of thousands of their fellow citizens had banded together in homegrown militias. Within the next few years, numerous studies and media reports appeared revealing the unseen world of the American militia movement, a loose alliance of groups with widely divergent views. Not surprisingly, it was the movement’s most extreme voices that attracted the lion's share of attention.

In reality the militia movement was neither as irrational nor as new as it was portrayed in the press, Robert Churchill writes. What bound the movement together was the shared belief that citizens have a right, even a duty, to take up arms against wanton exercise of unconstitutional power by the federal government. Many were motivated to join the movement by what they saw as a rise in state violence, illustrated by the government assaults at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992, and Waco, Texas in 1993. It was this perception and the determination to deter future state violence, Churchill argues, that played the greatest role in the growth of the American militia movement.

Churchill uses three case studies to illustrate the origin of some of the core values of the modern militia movement: Fries' Rebellion in Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century, the Sons of Liberty Conspiracy in Civil War-era Indiana and Illinois, and the Black Legion in Michigan and Ohio during the Depression. Building on extensive interviews with militia members, the author places the contemporary militia movement in the context of these earlier insurrectionary movements that, animated by a libertarian interpretation of the American Revolution, used force to resist the authority of the federal government.

A historian of early America, Robert H. Churchill has published numerous articles on  American political violence and the right to keep and bear arms. He is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Hartford.

"This book is about how we think about the past, how cultural memories are formed and evolve, and how these memories then come to impact current understandings of issues. Churchill provides an enlightening analysis of the ideology, structure, and purpose of the militia movement. Where much scholarship has categorized it as a cohesive, single movement, Churchill begins the process of unraveling its complexity."
---Steve Chermak, Michigan State University

"To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face addresses an area---the relationship of American political violence to American ideology---that is of growing importance and that is commanding an ever increasing audience, and it does so in a way like nothing else in the field."
---David Williams, Indiana University Bloomington

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cover of Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice

Transforming Environmentalism

Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice

McGurty, Eileen

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Contemporary public policy circles are quick to acknowledge that environmental factors contribute to ill health and pose a particular threat to poor and minority communities. But public officials rarely examined the distribution of environmental hazards such as polluted air and contaminated water. In the 1980s, as toxic waste facilities proliferated, the environmental justice movement demanded that impoverished communities no longer be burdened by excessive environmental risks.    
In Transforming Environmentalism, Eileen McGurty explores a moment central to the emergence of the environmental justice movement. In 1978, residents of predominantly African American Warren County, North Carolina, were horrified to learn that the state planned to build a landfill in their county to hold forty thousand cubic yards of soil that was contaminated with PCBs from illegal dumping. They responded to the state's plans with a four-year resistance, ending in a month of protests with over 500 arrests from civil disobedience and disruptive actions.McGurty traces the evolving approaches that residents took to contest "environmental racism" in their community and shows how activism in Warren County spurred greater political debate and became a model for communities across the nation. Transforming Environmentalism explores how the specific circumstances of the Warren County events shaped the formation of the environmental justice movement and influenced contemporary environmentalism.
[more]
cover of Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria

Two Dreams in One Bed

Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria

Hyun Ok Park

Duke University Press, 2005

Rethinking a key epoch in East Asian history, Hyun Ok Park formulates a new understanding of early-twentieth-century Manchuria. Most studies of the history of modern Manchuria examine the turbulent relations of the Chinese state and imperialist Japan in political, military, and economic terms. Park presents a compelling analysis of the constitutive effects of capitalist expansion on the social practices of Korean migrants in the region.

Drawing on a rich archive of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese sources, Park describes how Koreans negotiated the contradictory demands of national and colonial powers. She demonstrates that the dynamics of global capitalism led the Chinese and Japanese to pursue capitalist expansion while competing for sovereignty. Decentering the nation-state as the primary analytic rubric, her emphasis on the role of global capitalism is a major innovation for understanding nationalism, colonialism, and their immanent links in social space.

Through a regional and temporal comparison of Manchuria from the late nineteenth century until 1945, Park details how national and colonial powers enacted their claims to sovereignty through the regulation of access to land, work, and loans. She shows that among Korean migrants, the complex connections among Chinese laws, Japanese colonial policies, and Korean social practices gave rise to a form of nationalism in tension with global revolution—a nationalism that laid the foundation for what came to be regarded as North Korea’s isolationist politics.

[more]