Search results for ""University of Chicago Press""

Misunderstood and stereotyped, the black family in America has been viewed by some as pathologically weak while others have acclaimed its resilience and strength. Those who have drawn these conflicting conclusions have gnerally focused on the nuclear family—husband, wife, and dependent children. But as Elmer and Joanne Martin point out in this revealing book, a unit of this kind often is not the center of black family life. What appear to be fatherless, broken homes in our cities may really be vital parts of strong and flexible extended families based hundreds of miles away—usually in a rural area. Through their eight-year study of some thirty extended families, the Martins find that economic pressures, including federal tax and welfare laws, have begun to make the extended family's flexibility into a liability that threatens its future.

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In this major new work, philosopher of religion Nancy Levene examines the elemental character of modernity and religion. Deep in their operating system, she argues, are dualisms of opposition and identity that lead to social and personal dead ends. But alongside them we also find a hidden dualism that of mutual relation which it is our task to cultivate. Levene uncovers this lost distinction between dualistic systems. In one system, the perennial dualism of the one and the many, the terms are either opposed or identified. In the other system, the terms are held in a relation of mutuality. In readings from Abraham to the present, Levene recovers this distinction, showing how it liberates thinking and politics and renews modernity's most innovative ideals- democracy, criticism, interpretation. From Abraham we get the biblical call to give up tribal belonging for covenantal relation. Modernity, which Levene argues encompasses Abraham's call, bequeaths the political work of constituting collectives with a critique of all that divides self from other, us from them. Drawing on a long tradition of thinkers and scholars even as she breaks new ground, Levene offers here nothing less than a new way of understanding modernity as an ethical claim about our world, a philosophy of the powers of distinction to include rather than to divide.

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In 1883 the editor of a penny newspaper stood trial three times for the "obsolete" crime of blasphemy. The editor was G.W. Foote, the paper was the "Freethinker", and the trial was the defining event of the decade. This is a reconstructed account of blasphemy in Victorian England, retelling the forgotten stories of more than 200 working-class blasphemers, such as Foote, whose stubborn refusal to silence their "hooligan" voices helped secure the present right to speak and write freely, and whose "martyrdom" transformed blasphemy from a religious offence into a class and cultural crime.

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While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. The word philosophy means "love of wisdom," but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. In "The Erotic Phenomenon", Jean-Luc Marion attends to this dearth with an inquiry into the concept of love itself.Marion begins with a critique of Descartes' equation of the ego's ability to doubt with the certainty that one exists. We encounter love, he says, when we first step forward as a lover: I love therefore I am, and my love is the reason I care whether I exist or not. This philosophical base allows Marion to probe several manifestations of love and its variations, including carnal excitement, self-hate, lying and perversion, fidelity, the generation of children, and the love of God. Throughout, Marion stresses that all erotic phenomena stem not from the ego as popularly understood but instead from love.

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Who reads poetry? We know that poets do, but what about the rest of us? When and why do we turn to verse? Seeking the answer, Poetry magazine since 2005 has published a column called "The View From Here," which has invited readers "from outside the world of poetry" to describe what has drawn them to poetry. Over the years, the incredibly diverse set of contributors have included philosophers, journalists, musicians, and artists, as well as doctors and soldiers, an iron-worker, an anthropologist, and an economist. This collection brings together fifty compelling pieces, which are in turns surprising, provocative, touching, and funny. In one essay, musician Neko Case calls poetry "a delicate, pretty lady with a candy exoskeleton on the outside of her crepe-paper dress." In another, anthropologist Helen Fisher turns to poetry while researching the effects of love on the brain, "As other anthropologists have studied fossils, arrowheads, or pot shards to understand human thought, I studied poetry...I wasn't disappointed: everywhere poets have described the emotional fallout produced by the brain's eruptions." Even film critic Roger Ebert memorized the poetry of e. e. cummings, and the rapper Rhymefest attests here to the self-actualizing power of poems: "Words can create worlds, and I've discovered that poetry can not only be read but also lived out. My life is a poem." Music critic Alex Ross tells us that he keeps a paperback of The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens on his desk next to other, more utilitarian books like a German dictionary, a King James Bible, and a Macintosh troubleshooting manual. Who Reads Poetry offers a truly unique and broad selection of perspectives and reflections, proving that poetry can be read by everyone. No matter what you're seeking, you can find it within the lines of a poem.

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Although the rational choice approach toward political behavior has been severely criticized, its adherents claim that competing models have failed to offer a more scientific model of political decisionmaking. This measured but provocative book offers precisely that: an alternative way of understanding political behavior based on cognitive research.The authors draw on research in neuroscience, physiology, and experimental psychology to conceptualize habit and reason as two mental states that interact in a delicate, highly functional balance controlled by emotion. Applying this approach to more than fifteen years of election results, they shed light on a wide range of political behavior, including party identification, symbolic politics, and negative campaigning.Remarkably accessible, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment urges social scientists to move beyond the idealistic notion of the purely rational citizen to form a more complete, realistic model that includes the emotional side of human judgment.

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"Leah Marcus's The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes is a fascinating study of why James and Charles promoted some types of rural sport and festival and of how certain literary texts participated in promoting or critiquing royal policy. . . . Marcus provocatively links texts not often studied in conjunction with one another, and she provides strong and detailed readings of those texts."—Jean E. Howard

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Even though it's frequently asserted that we are living in a golden age of scripted television, television as a medium is still not taken seriously as an artistic art form, nor has the stigma of television as "chewing gum for the mind" really disappeared. Philosopher Martin Shuster argues that television is the modern art form, full of promise and urgency, and in New Television, he offers a strong philosophical justification for its importance. Through careful analysis of shows including The Wire, Justified, and Weeds, among others; and European and Anglophone philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger; Shuster reveals how various contemporary television series engage deeply with aesthetic and philosophical issues in modernism and modernity. What unifies the aesthetic and philosophical ambitions of new television is a commitment to portraying and exploring the family as the last site of political possibility in a world otherwise bereft of any other sources of traditional authority; consequently, at the heart of new television are profound political stakes.

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In "German Idealism and the Jew", Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the redefinition of the Jews as irrational, oriental Others forms the very cornerstone of German idealism, including Kant's conception of universal reason. Offering the first analytical account of the connection between anti-Semitism and philosophy, Mack begins his exploration by showing how the fundamental thinkers in the German idealist tradition - Kant, Hegel, and, through them, Feuerbach and Wagner - argued that the human world should perform and enact the promises held out by a conception of an otherworldly heaven. But their respective philosophies all ran aground on the belief that the worldly proved incapable of transforming itself into this otherworldly ideal. To reconcile this incommensurability, Mack argues, philosophers created a construction of Jews as symbolic of the "worldliness" that hindered the development of a body politic and that served as a foil to Kantian autonomy and rationality. In the second part, Mack examines how Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig and Freud, among others, grappled with being both German and Jewish. Each thinker accepted the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in varying degrees, while simultaneously critiquing anti-Semitism in order to develop the modern Jewish notion of what it meant to be enlightened - a concept that differed substantially from that of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach and Wagner. By speaking the unspoken in German philosophy, this book profoundly reshapes our understanding of it.

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In the life sciences, there is wide-ranging debate about biodiversity. While nearly everyone is in favor of biodiversity and its conservation, methods for its assessment vary enormously. So what exactly is biodiversity? Most theoretical work on the subject assumes it has something to do with species richness - the number of species in a particular region - but in reality, it is much more than that. Arguing that we can not make rational decisions about what it is to be protected without knowing what biodiversity is, James Maclaurin and Kim Sterelny offer in "What Is Biodiversity?" a theoretical and conceptual exploration of the biological world and how diversity is valued.Here, Maclaurin and Sterelny investigate not only the origins of the concept of biodiversity, but also how that concept has been shaped by ecology and more recently by conservation biology. They explain the different types of biodiversity important in evolutionary theory, developmental biology, ecology, morphology, and taxonomy and conclude that biological heritage is rich in not just one biodiversity but many. Maclaurin and Sterelny also explore the case for the conservation of these biodiversities using option value theory, a tool borrowed from economics.An erudite, provocative, timely, and creative attempt to answer a fundamental question, "What Is Biodiversity?" will become a foundational text in the life sciences and studies thereof.

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Between 1965 and 1985, the Western world - and the United States in particular - experienced a staggering amount of social and economic change. In Birth Quake, Diane J. Macunovich argues that the common thread underlying all these changes was the post-World War II baby boom - in particular, the passage of the baby boomers into young adulthood. Macunovich focuses on the pervasive effects of changes in "relative cohort size," the ratio of young to middle-aged adults, as masses of young people tried to achieve the standard of living to which they had become accustomed in their parents' homes despite dramatic reductions in their earning potential relative to that of their parents. Macunovich presents the results of detailed empirical analyses that illustrate how varied and important cohort effects can be on a wide range of economic indicators, social factors, and even on more tumultuous events including the stock market crash of 1929, the "oil shock" of 1973, and the "Asian flu" of the 1990s. Birth Quake demonstrates that no discussion of business or economic trends can afford to ignore the effects of population.

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When Breeze FM Radio, in the provincial Zambian town of Chipata, hired an elderly retired school teacher in 2003, no one anticipated the skyrocketing success that would follow. A self-styled grandfather on air, Gogo Breeze seeks intimacy over the airwaves and dispenses advice on a wide variety of grievances and transgressions. Multiple voices are broadcast and juxtaposed through call-ins and dialogue, but free speech finds its ally in the radio elder who, by allowing people to be heard and supporting their claims, reminds authorities of their obligations toward the disaffected. Harri Englund provides a masterfully detailed study of this popular radio personality that addresses broad questions of free speech in Zambia and beyond. By drawing on ethnographic insights into political communication, Englund presents multivocal morality as an alternative to dominant Euro-American perspectives, displacing the simplistic notion of voice as individual personal property an idea common in both policy and activist rhetoric. Instead, Englund focuses on the creativity and polyphony of Zambian radio while raising important questions about hierarchy, elderhood, and ethics in the public sphere. A lively, engaging portrait of an extraordinary personality, Gogo Breeze will interest Africanists, scholars of radio and mass media, and anyone interested in the history and future of free speech.

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All too often in contemporary discourse, we hear about science overstepping its proper limits about its brazenness, arrogance, and intellectual imperialism. The problem, critics say, is scientism: the privileging of science over all other ways of knowing. Science, they warn, cannot do or explain everything, no matter what some enthusiasts believe. In Science Unlimited?, noted philosophers of science Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci gather a diverse group of scientists, science communicators, and philosophers of science to explore the limits of science and this alleged threat of scientism. In this wide-ranging collection, contributors ask whether the term scientism in fact (or in belief) captures an interesting and important intellectual stance, and whether it is something that should alarm us. Is scientism a well-developed position about the superiority of science over all other modes of human inquiry? Or is it more a form of excessive confidence, an uncritical attitude of glowing admiration? What, if any, are its dangers? Are fears that science will marginalize the humanities and eradicate the human subject that it will explain away emotion, free will, consciousness, and the mystery of existence justified? Does science need to be reined in before it drives out all other disciplines and ways of knowing? Both rigorous and balanced, Science Unlimited? interrogates our use of a term that is now all but ubiquitous in a wide variety of contexts and debates. Bringing together scientists and philosophers, both friends and foes of scientism, it is a conversation long overdue.

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Dave Kehr's writing about film has garnered high praise from both readers and fellow critics. Among his admirers are some of his most influential contemporaries. Roger Ebert called Kehr "one of the most gifted film critics in America." James Naremore thought he was "one of the best writers on film the country as a whole has ever produced." But aside from remarkably detailed but brief capsule reviews and top-ten lists, you won't find much of Kehr's work on the Internet, and many of the longer and more nuanced essays for which he is best known have not yet been published in book form. With When Movies Mattered, readers welcomed the first collection of Kehr's criticism, written during his time at the Chicago Reader. Movies That Mattered is its sequel, with fifty more reviews and essays drawn from the archives of both the Chicago Reader and Chicago magazine from 1974 to 1986. As with When Movies Mattered, the majority of the reviews offer in-depth analyses of individual films that are among Kehr's favorites, from a thoughtful discussion of the sobering Holocaust documentary Shoah to an irresistible celebration of the raucous comedy Used Cars. But fans of Kehr's work will be just as taken by his dissections of critically acclaimed films he found disappointing, including The Shining, Apocalypse Now, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Whether you're a long-time reader or just discovering Dave Kehr, the insights in Movies That Mattered will enhance your appreciation of the movies you already love--and may even make you think twice about one or two you hated.

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Michael Jackson has spent much of his career elaborating his rich conception of lifeworlds, mining his ethnographic and personal experience for insights into how our subjective and social lives are mutually constituted. In How Lifeworlds Work, Jackson draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa to highlight the dynamic quality of human relationships and reinvigorate the study of kinship and ritual. How, he asks, do we manage the perpetual process of accommodation between social norms and personal emotions, impulses, and desires? How are these two dimensions of lived reality joined, and how are the dual imperatives of individual expression and collective viability managed? Drawing on the pragmatist tradition, psychology, and phenomenology, Jackson offers an unforgettable, beautifully written account of how we make, unmake, and remake, our lifeworlds.

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Refrains about monetary hardships are ubiquitous in contemporary Nigeria, frequently expressed with the idiom "to be a man is not a one-day job." But while men talk constantly about money, underlying their economic worries are broader concerns about the shifting meanings of masculinity, marked by changing expectations and practices of intimacy. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in southeastern Nigeria, Daniel Jordan Smith takes readers through the principal phases and arenas of men's lives: the transition to adulthood; searching for work and making a living; courtship, marriage and fatherhood; fraternal and political relationships among men; and finally, the attainment of elder status and death. He relates men's struggles to fulfill both their own aspirations and society's expectations. He also considers men who behave badly, mistreat their wives and children, or resort to crime and violence. All of these men face similar challenges as they navigate the complex geometry of money and intimacy. Unraveling these connections, Smith argues, provides us with a deeper understanding of both masculinity and society in Nigeria.

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An actor's deepest desire is to be understood. But when asked to pronounce such words as 'chanson,' 'phantasime,' or 'quaestor,' many otherwise unflappable actors can be rendered speechless."The Eloquent Shakespeare" aims to untie those tongues and help anyone speak Shakespeare's language with ease. More than 17,000 entries make it the most comprehensive pronunciation guide to Shakespeare's words, from the common to the arcane. Each entry is written in the International Phonetic Alphabet and represents standard American pronunciations, making this dictionary perfect for North American professionals or non-native speakers of American English.Renowned Shakespearean voice and text coach Gary Logan has spent years teaching Shakespeare's works to some of the best actors in the world. His book includes proper names and foreign words and phrases, as well as an extensive introduction that covers everything from how to interpret the entries to scansion dynamics. Designed especially for actors, directors, stage managers, and teachers, "The Eloquent Shakespeare" is a one-of-a-kind resource for performing Shakespeare's dramatic works.

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The thirty-first edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features theoretical and empirical research on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. The first two papers are rigorous and data-driven analyses of the European financial crisis. The third paper introduces a new set of facts about economic growth and financial ratios as well as a new macrofinancial database for the study of historical financial booms and busts. The fourth paper studies the historical effects of Federal Reserve efforts to provide guidance about the future path of the funds rate. The fifth paper explores the distinctions between models of price setting and associated nominal frictions using data on price setting behavior. The sixth paper considers the possibility that the economy displays nonlinear dynamics that lead to cycles rather than long-term convergence to a steady state. The volume also includes a short paper on the decline in the rate of global economic growth.

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Politicians and political parties are for the most part limited by habit they recycle tried-and-true strategies, draw on models from the past, and mimic others in the present. But in rare moments politicians break with routine and try something new. Drawing on pragmatist theories of social action, Revolutionizing Repertoires sets out to examine what happens when the repertoire of practices available to political actors is dramatically reconfigured. Taking as his case study the development of a distinctively Latin American style of populist mobilization, Robert S. Jansen analyzes the Peruvian presidential election of 1931. He finds that, ultimately, populist mobilization emerged in the country at this time because newly empowered outsiders recognized the limitations of routine political practice and understood how to modify, transpose, invent, and recombine practices in a whole new way. Suggesting striking parallels to the recent populist turn in global politics, Revolutionizing Repertoires offers new insights not only to historians of Peru, but also to scholars of historical sociology and comparative politics, and to anyone interested in the social and political origins of populism.

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Audiences love the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but beyond the red carpet and behind the velvet curtain exists a legion of individuals who make showbiz work: agents. Whether literary, talent, or indie film, agents are behind the scenes brokering power, handling mediation, and doing the deal-making that keeps Hollywood spinning. In Representing Talent, Violaine Roussel explores the little-known but decisive work of agents, turning the spotlight on how they help produce popular culture. The book takes readers behind the scenes to observe the day-to-day activities of agents, revealing their influence on artistic careers and the prospects of Hollywood's forthcoming projects. Agents are crucial to understanding how creative and economic power are intertwined in Hollywood today. They play a key role in the process by which artistic worth and economic value are evaluated and attributed to people and projects. Roussel's fieldwork examines what "having relationships" really means for agents, and how they perform the relationship work that's at the heart of their professional existence and success. Representing Talent helps us to understand the players behind the definition of entertainment itself, as well as behind its current transformations.

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Audiences love the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but beyond the red carpet and behind the velvet curtain exists a legion of individuals who make showbiz work: agents. Whether literary, talent, or indie film, agents are behind the scenes brokering power, handling mediation, and doing the deal-making that keeps Hollywood spinning. In Representing Talent, Violaine Roussel explores the little-known but decisive work of agents, turning the spotlight on how they help produce popular culture. The book takes readers behind the scenes to observe the day-to-day activities of agents, revealing their influence on artistic careers and the prospects of Hollywood's forthcoming projects. Agents are crucial to understanding how creative and economic power are intertwined in Hollywood today. They play a key role in the process by which artistic worth and economic value are evaluated and attributed to people and projects. Roussel's fieldwork examines what "having relationships" really means for agents, and how they perform the relationship work that's at the heart of their professional existence and success. Representing Talent helps us to understand the players behind the definition of entertainment itself, as well as behind its current transformations.

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What is a hostile environment? How exactly can feelings be mixed? What on earth might it mean when someone writes that he was "happily situated" as a slave? The answers, of course, depend upon whom you ask. Science and the humanities typically offer two different paradigms for thinking about emotion--the first rooted in brain and biology, the second in a social world. With rhetoric as a field guide, Uncomfortable Situations establishes common ground between these two paradigms, focusing on a theory of situated emotion. Daniel M. Gross anchors the argument in Charles Darwin, whose work on emotion has been misunderstood across the disciplines as it has been shoehorned into the perceived science-humanities divide. Then Gross turns to sentimental literature as the single best domain for studying emotional situations. There's lost composure (Sterne), bearing up (Equiano), environmental hostility (Radcliffe), and feeling mixed (Austen). Rounding out the book, an epilogue written with ecological neuroscientist Stephanie Preston provides a different kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Uncomfortable Situations is a conciliatory work across science and the humanities--a groundbreaking model for future studies.

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In Enchanted Islands, renowned art historian Mary D. Sheriff explores the legendary, fictional, and real islands that filled the French imagination during the ancien regime as they appeared in royal ballets and festivals, epic literature, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and other objects. Some of the islands were mythical and found in the most popular literary texts of the day--islands featured prominently, for instance, in Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and Fenelon's, Telemachus. Other islands--real ones, such as Tahiti and St. Domingue--the French learned about from the writings of travelers and colonists. All of them were imagined to be the home of enchantresses who used magic to conquer heroes by promising sensual and sexual pleasure. As Sheriff shows, the theme of the enchanted island was put to many uses. Kings deployed enchanted-island mythology to strengthen monarchical authority, as Louis XIV did in his famous Versailles festival Les Plaisirs de l'ile enchantee. Writers such as Fenelon used it to tell morality tales that taught virtue, duty, and the need for male strength to triumph over female weakness and seduction. Yet at the same time, artists like Boucher painted enchanted islands to portray art's purpose as the giving of pleasure. In all these ways and more, Sheriff demonstrates for the first time the centrality of enchanted islands to ancient regime culture in a book that will enchant all readers interested in the art, literature, and history of the time.

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Drawing on the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, this book sets out to illuminate the practical imagination as it was exhibited in the transformation of the political and social sciences during 19th-century Germany. Using information derived from many sources, including state and university archives, private correspondence, and a survey of lecture offerings in German universities, it examines the original group of learned disciplines which originated in 18th-century Germany as a curriculum to train state officials in the administration and reform of society. These disciplines included economics, statistics, public administration, finance and state law, as well as agriculture, forestry and mining. The book explores the ways in which some systems of knowledge became extinct, and how new ones came into existence, while others migrated to different subject areas. Lindenfeld argues that these sciences of state developed a technique of deliberation on practical issues such as tax policy and welfare which serves as a model for contemporary administrations.

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Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley bring together essays that challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts-- "power" and "time"--as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how "temporal regimes" are constituted through the shaping of power in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on a wide variety of subjects: human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world's most respected and innovative contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.

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What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are at bottom religious questions. Whether or not you have been inside of a cathedral, a temple, or a seminary, you live in the frame of religion. In eleven essays exploring soap and office cubicles, Britney Spears and the Kardashians, corporate culture and Goldman Sachs, Lofton shows the conceptual levers of religion in thinking about social modes of encounter, use, and longing. Wherever we see people articulate their dreams of and for the world, wherever we see those dreams organized into protocols, images, manuals, and contracts, we glimpse what the word "religion" allows us to describe and understand. With great style and analytical acumen, Lofton offers the ultimate guide to religion and consumption in our capitalizing times.

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Geoffrey Galt Harpham's book takes its title from a telling anecdote. A few years ago Harpham met a Cuban immigrant on a college campus, who told of arriving, penniless and undocumented, in the 1960s and eventually earning a GED and making his way to a community college. In a literature course one day, the professor asked him, "Mr. Ramirez, what do you think?" The question, said Ramirez, changed his life because "it was the first time anyone had asked me that." Realizing that his opinion had value set him on a course that led to his becoming a distinguished professor. That, says Harpham, was the midcentury promise of American education, the deep current of commitment and aspiration that undergirded the educational system that was built in the postwar years, and is under extended assault today. The United States was founded, he argues, on the idea that interpreting its foundational documents was the highest calling of opinion, and for a brief moment at midcentury, the country turned to English teachers as the people best positioned to train students to thrive as interpreters--which is to say as citizens of a democracy. Tracing the roots of that belief in the humanities through American history, Harpham builds a strong case that, even in very different contemporary circumstances, the emphasis on social and cultural knowledge that animated the midcentury university is a resource that we can, and should, draw on today.

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David Rowell is a professional journalist and an impassioned amateur musician. He's spent decades behind a drum kit, pondering the musical relationship between equipment and emotion. In Wherever the Sound Takes You, he explores the essence of music's meaning with a wide spectrum of musicians, trying to understand their connection to their chosen instrument, what they've put themselves through for their music, and what they feel when they play. This wide-ranging and openhearted book blossoms outward from there. Rowell visits clubs, concert halls, street corners, and open mics, traveling from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland to a death metal festival in Maryland, with stops along the way in the Alps and Appalachia. His keen reportorial eye treats us to in-depth portraits of everyone from platinum-selling legend Peter Frampton to a devout Christian who spends his days alone in a storage unit bashing away on one of the largest drum sets in the world. Rowell illuminates the feelings that both spur music's creation and emerge from its performance, as well as the physical instruments that enable their expression. With an uncommon sensitivity and endless curiosity, he charts the pleasure and pain of musicians consumed with their craft-as all of us listen in.

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Vulnerability. We see it everywhere. In once permanent institutions. In runaway pandemics. In democracy itself. And most frighteningly, in ecosystems with no sustainable future. Against these large-scale hazards of climate change, what can literature teach us? This is the question Wai Chee Dimock asks in Weak Planet, proposing a way forward, inspired by works that survive through kinship with strangers and with the nonhuman world. Drawing on Native American studies, disability studies, and environmental humanities, Dimock shows how hope can be found not in heroic statements but in incremental and unspectacular teamwork. Reversing the usual focus on hegemonic institutions, she highlights instead incomplete gestures given an afterlife with the help of others. She looks at Louise Erdrich’s and Sherman Alexie’s user-amended captivity narratives; nontragic sequels to Moby-Dick by C. L. R. James, Frank Stella, and Amitav Ghosh; induced forms of Irishness in Henry James, Colm Tóibín, W. B. Yeats, and Gish Jen; and the experimentations afforded by a blurry Islam in works by Henri Matisse, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Langston Hughes. Celebrating literature’s durability as an assisted outcome, Weak Planet gives us new ways to think about our collective future.

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This is a behind-the-scenes look at the search for human origins, analyzing how the biases and preconceptions of paleoanthropologists shape their work. The stories of the Taung Child and Neanderthal Man provide the background to the modern search for an exploration of how and where humans evolved. In this edition, the afterword looks at ways in which paleoanthropology, while becoming more scientific, in many ways remains contentious. It is Lewin's thesis that paleoanthropology is the most subjective of sciences because it engages the emotions of virtually everyone; and since the evidence is scanty, interpretation is all-important.

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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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This seminal work in several fields—person-centered anthropology, comparative psychology, and social history—documents the inner life of the Tahitians with sensitivity and insight. At the same time Levy reveals the ways in which private and public worlds interact. Tahitians is an ethnography focused on private but culturally organized behavior resulting in a wealth of material for the understanding of the interaction among historical, cultural, and personal spheres. "This is a unique addition to anthropological literature. . . . No review could substitute for reading it."—Margaret Mead, American Anthropologist

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The Supreme Court is seen today as the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution. Once the Court has spoken, it is the duty of the citizens and their elected officials to abide by its decisions. But the conception of the Supreme Court as the final interpreter of constitutional law took hold only relatively recently. Drawing on the pragmatic ideals characterized by Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, Charles Sabel, and Richard Posner. Brian E. Butler shows how this conception is inherently problematic for a healthy democracy. Butler offers an alternative democratic conception of constitutional law, "democratic experimentalism," and applies it in a thorough reconstruction of Supreme Court cases across the centuries, such as Brown v. Board of Education, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, and Lochner v. New York. In contrast to the traditional tools and conceptions of legal analysis that see the law as a formally unique and separate type of practice, democratic experimentalism combines democratic aims and experimental practice. Butler also suggests other directions jurisprudential roles could take: for example, adjudication could be performed by primary stakeholders with better information. Ultimately, Butler argues persuasively for a move away from the current absolute centrality of courts toward a system of justice that emphasizes local rule and democratic choice.

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From the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged--socially, sexually, even racially--by the extravagances of belief they called "religion." Make Yourselves Gods offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century's end. Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism--an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism.

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This revision of avant-garde history traces a direct line back from John Cage, pop and conceptual art, through the Futurists, to Whitman, Emerson, Ruskin, Carlyle and Wordsworth, showing how the art of everyday objects, often thought an exclusively contemporary phenomenon, actually began as far back as 1800. In recovering the links between such seemingly disparate figures, this work is intended to provide a better understanding of modern culture.

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The years before World War I were a time of profound social and political ferment in Europe that deeply affected the art world. The center of this creative tumult was Paris, where many avant-garde artists sought to transform modern art through their engagement with radical politics. In this lively look at art and anarchism in prewar France, Patricia Leighten argues that anarchist aesthetics and a related politics of form played crucial roles in the development of modern art, only to be suppressed soon after the war and then forgotten. Leighten examines the circle of artists - Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Frantisek Kupka, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen, and others - who thought anarchist politics drove the idea of avant-garde art, exploring how their aesthetic choices negotiated the myriad artistic languages operating in the decade before World War I. Whether working on political cartoons or avant-garde abstractions, these artists, she shows, were preoccupied with social criticism. Each sought an appropriate subject, medium, style, and audience based on different conceptions of how art influences society - and their choices constantly shifted as they responded to the dilemmas posed by contradictory anarchist ideas. Packed with illustrations, "The Liberation of Painting" restores revolutionary activism to the broader history of modern art.

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To write this history of the imagination, Le Goff has recreated the mental structures of medieval men and women by analyzing the images of man as microcosm and the Church as mystical body; the symbols of power such as flags and oriflammes; and the contradictory world of dreams, marvels, devils, and wild forests. "Le Goff is one of the most distinguished of the French medieval historians of his generation ...he has exercised immense influence."--Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books "The whole book turns on a fascinating blend of the brutally materialistic and the generously imaginative."--Tom Shippey, London Review of Books "The richness, imaginativeness and sheer learning of Le Goff's work ...demand to be experienced."--M. T. Clanchy, Times Literary Supplement

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"In our imaginations, war is the name we give to the extremes of violence in our lives, the dark dividing opposite of the connecting myth, which we call love. War enacts the great antagonisms of history, the agonies of nations; but it also offers metaphors for those other antagonisms, the private battles of our private lives, our conflicts with one another and with the world, and with ourselves." Samuel Hynes knows war personally: he served as a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II, receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. He has spent his life balancing two careers: pilot and professor of literature. Hynes has written a number of major works of literary criticism, as well as a war-memoir, Flights of Passage, and several books about the World Wars. His writing is sharp, lucid, and has provided some of the most expert, detailed, and empathetic accounts of a disappearing generation of fighters and writers. On War and Writing offers for the first time a selection of Hynes's essays and introductions that explore the traditions of war writing from the twentieth century to the present. Hynes takes as a given that war itself--the battlefield uproar of actual combat--is unimaginable for those who weren't there, yet we have never been able to turn away from it. We want to know what war is really like: for a soldier on the Somme; a submariner in the Pacific; a bomber pilot over Germany; a tank commander in the Libyan desert. To learn, we turn again and again to the memories of those who were there, and to the imaginations of those who weren't, but are poets, or filmmakers, or painters, who give us a sense of these experiences that we can't possibly know. The essays in this book range from the personal (Hynes's experience working with documentary master Ken Burns, his recollections of his own days as a combat pilot) to the critical (explorations of the works of writers and artists such as Thomas Hardy, e. e. cummings, and Cecil Day Lewis). What we ultimately see in On War and Writing is not military history, not the plans of generals, but the feelings of war, as young men expressed them in journals and poems, and old men remembered them in later years--men like Samuel Hynes.

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Crossing over the Line describes the folly of the Mann Act of 1910—a United States law which made travel from one state to another by a man and a woman with the intent of committing an immoral act a major crime. Spawned by a national wave of "white slave trade" hysteria, the Act was created by the Congress of the United States as a weapon against forced prostitution. This book is the first history of the Mann Act's often bizarre career, from its passage to the amendment that finally laid it low. In David J. Langum's hands, the story of the Act becomes an entertaining cautionary tale about the folly of legislating private morality.Langum recounts the colorful details of numerous court cases to show how enforcement of the Act mirrored changes in America's social attitudes. Federal prosecutors became masters in the selective use of the Act: against political opponents of the government, like Charlie Chaplin; against individuals who eluded other criminal charges, like the Capone mobster "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn; and against black men, like singer Chuck Berry and boxer Jack Johnson, who dared to consort with white women. The Act engendered a thriving blackmail industry and was used by women like Frank Lloyd Wright's wife to extort favorable divorce settlements. "Crossing over the Line is a work of scholarship as wrought by a civil libertarian, and the text . . . sizzles with the passion of an ardent believer in real liberty under reasonable laws."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

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The early twentieth century was marked by massive migration of southern Europeans to the United States. Transatlantic Subjects views this diaspora through the lens of Greek migrant life to reveal the emergence of transnational forms of subjectivity. According to Ioanna Laliotou, cultural institutions and practices played an important role in the formation of migrant subjectivities. Reconstructing the cultural history of migration, her book points out the relationship between subjectivity formation and cultural practices and performances, such as publishing, reading, acting, storytelling, consuming, imitating, parading, and traveling. Transatlantic Subjects then locates the development of these practices within key sites and institutions of cultural formation, such as migrant and fraternal associations, educational institutions, state agencies and nongovernmental organizations, mental institutions, coffee shops, the church, steamship companies, banks, migration services, and chambers of commerce. Ultimately, Laliotou explores the complex and situational entanglements of migrancy, cultural nationalism, and the politics of self. Reading against the grain of hegemonic narratives of cultural and migration histories, she reveals how migrancy produced distinctive forms of sociality during the first half of the twentieth century.

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Drawing out the underlying economics in business history, this text focuses on learning processes and the development of competitively valuable asymmetries. The essays show that organizations, like people, learn that this process can be organized more or less effectively, which can have major implications for how competition works. The first three essays in this volume explore techniques firms have used to both manage information to create valuable asymmetries and to otherwise suppress unwelcome competition. The next three focus on the ways in which firms have built special capabilities over time, capabilities that have been both sources of competitive advantage and resistance to new opportunities. The last two extend the notion of learning from the level of firms to that of nations. The collection as a whole builds on the previous two volumes to make the connection between information structure and product market outcomes in business history.

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Case studies that examine how firms co-ordinate economic activity in the face of asymmetric information, information not equally available to all parties, are the focus of this volume. In an ideal world, the market would be the optimal provider of co-ordination, but in the real world of incomplete information, some activities are better coordinated in other ways. Divided into three parts, this book addresses co-ordination within firms, at the borders of firms and outside firms, providing a picture of the overall incidence and logic of economic co-ordination. The case studies - drawn from the late 19th and early 20th century, when the modern business enterprise was evolving, address such issues as the relationship between co-ordination mechanisms and production techniques, the logic of co-ordination in industrial districts and the consequences of regulation for co-ordination. Continuing the work on information and organization presented in "Inside the Business Enterprise", this book provides material that may be useful for business historians and economists who want to study the development of the dissemination of information and the co-ordination of economic activity within and between firms.

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"Asia in the Making of Europe" traces European encounters with Asia, and the ways in which those encounters have altered the development of Western society, art, literature, science, and religion since the Renaissance. In doing so, this work provides a perspective necessary for a balanced view of European and Asian history. "A Century of Advance," the third volume of this work, is devoted to the 17th century.

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Fathers in the 1950s tend to be portrayed as wise and genial pipe-smokers or distant, emotionless patriarchs. These common but limited stereotypes obscures the remarkable diversity of their experiences and those of their children. To uncover the real story of fatherhood during this transformative era, Ralph LaRossa takes the long view - from the attack on Pearl Harbor up to the election of John F. Kennedy - revealing the myriad ways that World War II and its aftermath shaped men. Offering compelling accounts of people both ordinary and extraordinary, "Of War and Men" digs deep into the terrain of fatherhood. LaRossa explores the nature and aftereffects of combat, the culture of fear during the Cold War, the ways that fear altered the lives of racial and sexual minorities, and how the civil rights movement affected families both black and white. Overturning some calcified myths, LaRossa also analyzes the impact of suburbanization on fathers and their kids, discovering that living in the suburbs often strengthened their bond. Finally, looking beyond the idealized dad enshrined in TV sitcoms, "Of War and Men" explores the brutal side of family life in the postwar years. LaRossa's richly researched book dismantles stereotypes while offering up a fascinating and incisive chronicle of fatherhood in all its complexity.

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Praised for its scope and depth, "Asia in the Making of Europe" is the first comprehensive study of Asian influences on Western culture. For volumes I and II, the author has sifted through virtually every European reference to Asia published in the sixteenth-century; he surveys a vast array of writings describing Asian life and society, the images of Asia that emerge from those writings, and, in turn, the reflections of those images in European literature and art. This monumental achievement reveals profound and pervasive influences of Asian societies on developing Western culture; in doing so, it provides a perspective necessary for a balanced view of world history."Volume I: The Century of Discovery" brings together "everything that a European could know of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, from printed books, missionary reports, traders' accounts and maps" ("The New York Review of Books"). "Volume II: A Century of Wonder" examines the influence of that vast new body of information about Asia on the arts, institutions, literatures, and ideas of sixteenth-century Europe.

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For decades, Woodrow Wilson has been remembered as either a paternalistic liberal or reactionary conservative at home and as a na ve idealist or cynical imperialist abroad. Historians' harsh judgments of Wilson are understandable. He won two elections by promising a deliberative democratic process that would ensure justice and political empowerment for all. Yet under Wilson, Jim Crow persisted, interventions in Latin America increased, and a humiliating peace settlement was forced upon Germany. A generation after Wilson, stark inequalities and injustices still plagued the nation, myopic nationalism hindered its responsible engagement in world affairs, and a second vastly destructive global conflict threatened the survival of democracy worldwide leaving some Americans today to wonder what, exactly, the buildings and programs bearing his name are commemorating. In Power without Victory, Trygve Throntveit argues that there is more to the story of Wilson than these sad truths. Throntveit makes the case that Wilson was not a "Wilsonian," as that term has come to be understood, but a principled pragmatist in the tradition of William James. He did not seek to stamp American-style democracy on other peoples, but to enable the gradual development of a genuinely global system of governance that would maintain justice and facilitate peaceful change a goal that, contrary to historical tradition, the American people embraced. In this brilliant intellectual, cultural, and political history, Throntveit gives us a new vision of Wilson, as well as a model of how to think about the complex relationship between the world of ideas and the worlds of policy and diplomacy.

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