Search results for ""University of Chicago Press""

From Nobel Prize-winning work in atomic physics to community concerns over radiation leaks, Brookhaven National Laboratory's ups and downs track the changing fortunes of "big science" in the United States since World War II. But Brookhaven is also unique; it was the first major national laboratory built specifically for basic civilian research. This text brings to life the people, the instruments, the science, and the politics of Brookhaven's first quarter-century. The book shows the experimental energy of Brookhaven's researchers, competing among themselves as well as with other laboratories around the world. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, from oral interviews and internal memos to lab notebooks and transcripts of security clearance hearings, Robert P. Crease recounts the difficult founding and siting of Brookhaven, the successful resolution of immense engineering and technical problems in the design and construction of experimental apparatus, and changing relations with the surrounding Long Island community. But most of all, Crease tells the stories of Brookhaven's scientists and their research, which has included detailed descriptions of the structure of the nucleus, early attempts at radiotherapy for inoperable tumours, and studies of strange particles and the weak and strong interactions.

Read more less

In this second volume of the unparalleled exposition of Rousseau's life and works, Cranston completes and corrects the story told in Rousseau's Confessions, and offers a vivid, entirely new history of his most eventful and productive years. "Luckily for us, Maurice Cranston's The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762 has managed to craft a highly detailed account of eight key years of Rousseau's life in such a way that we can both understand and even, on occasion, sympathize."—Olivier Bernier, Wall Street JournalMaurice Cranston (1920-1993), a distinguished scholar and recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography of John Locke, was professor of political science at the London School of Economics. His numerous books include The Romantic Movement and Philosophers and Pamphleteers, and translations of Rousseau's The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.

Read more less

"Welcome to the European family!" When East European countries joined the European Union under this banner after 1989, they agreed to the free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons. In this book, Anca Parvulescu analyzes an important niche in this imagined European kinship: the traffic in women, or the circulation of East European women in West Europe in marriage and as domestic servants, nannies, personal attendants, and entertainers. Analyzing film, national policies, and an impressive range of work by theorists from Giorgio Agamben to Judith Butler, she develops a critical lens through which to think about the transnational continuum of "women's work." Parvulescu revisits Claude Levi-Strauss' concept of kinship and its rearticulation by second-wave feminists, particularly Gayle Rubin, to show that kinship has traditionally been anchored in the traffic in women. Reading recent cinematic texts that help frame this, she reveals that in contemporary Europe, East European migrant women are exchanged to engage in labor customarily performed by wives within the institution of marriage. Tracing a pattern of what she calls Americanization, Parvulescu argues that these women thereby become responsible for the labor of reproduction. A fascinating cultural study as much about the consequences of the enlargement of the European Union as women's mobility, The Traffic in Women's Work questions the foundations of the notion of Europe today.

Read more less

Entrepreneurial science is not new; business interests have strongly influenced science since the Scientific Revolution. In Commercial Visions, Daniel Margocsy illustrates that product marketing, patent litigation, and even ghostwriting pervaded natural history and medicine - the "big sciences" of the early modern era - and argues that the growth of global trade during the Dutch Golden Age gave rise to an entrepreneurial network of transnational science. Margocsy introduces a number of natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in Amsterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Paris who, in their efforts to boost their trade, developed modern taxonomy, invented color printing and anatomical preparation techniques, and contributed to philosophical debates on topics ranging from human anatomy to Newtonian optics. These scientific practitioners, including Frederik Ruysch and Albertus Seba, were out to do business: they produced and sold exotic curiosities, anatomical prints, preserved specimens, and atlases of natural history to customers all around the world. Margocsy reveals how their entrepreneurial rivalries transformed the scholarly world of the Republic of Letters into a competitive marketplace. Margocsy's highly readable and engaging book will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in early modern science, global trade, art, and culture.

Read more less

From the snub-nosed monkeys of China to the mountain gorillas of central Africa, our closest nonhuman relatives are in critical danger worldwide. A recent report, for example, warns that nearly 20 percent of the world's primates may go extinct within the next ten or twenty years. In this book Guy Cowlishaw and Robin Dunbar integrate cutting-edge theoretical advances with practical management priorities to give scientists and policymakers the tools they need to help keep these species from disappearing forever.Primate Conservation Biology begins with detailed overviews of the diversity, life history, ecology, and behavior of primates and the ways these factors influence primate abundance and distribution. Cowlishaw and Dunbar then discuss the factors that put primates at the greatest risk of extinction, especially habitat disturbance and hunting. The remaining chapters present a comprehensive review of conservation strategies and management practices, highlighting the key issues that must be addressed to protect primates for the future.

Read more less

Macroecology is an approach to science that emphasizes the description and explanation of patterns and processes at large spatial and temporal scales. Some scientists liken it to seeing the forest through the trees, giving the proverbial phrase an ecological twist. The term itself was first introduced to the modern literature by James H. Brown and Brian A. Maurer, and it is Brown's classic study Macroecology that is credited with inspiring the broad-scale subfield of ecology. But as with all subfields, many modern-day elements of macroecology are implicit in earlier works dating back decades, even centuries. Foundations of Macroecology charts the evolutionary trajectory of these concepts-from the species-area relationship and the latitudinal gradient of species richness to the relationship between body size and metabolic rate-through forty-six landmark papers originally published between 1920 and 1998. Divided into two parts - "Macroecology before Macroecology" and "Dimensions of Macroecology" - the collection also takes the long view, with each paper accompanied by an original commentary from a contemporary expert in the field that places it in a broader context and explains its foundational role. Providing a solid, coherent assessment of the history, current state, and potential future of the field, Foundations of Macroecology will be an essential text for students and teachers of ecology alike.

Read more less

Macroecology is an approach to science that emphasizes the description and explanation of patterns and processes at large spatial and temporal scales. Some scientists liken it to seeing the forest through the trees, giving the proverbial phrase an ecological twist. The term itself was first introduced to the modern literature by James H. Brown and Brian A. Maurer, and it is Brown's classic study Macroecology that is credited with inspiring the broad-scale subfield of ecology. But as with all subfields, many modern-day elements of macroecology are implicit in earlier works dating back decades, even centuries. Foundations of Macroecology charts the evolutionary trajectory of these concepts - from the species-area relationship and the latitudinal gradient of species richness to the relationship between body size and metabolic rate - through forty-six landmark papers originally published between 1920 and 1998. Divided into two parts - "Macroecology before Macroecology" - and "Dimensions of Macroecology" - the collection also takes the long view, with each paper accompanied by an original commentary from a contemporary expert in the field that places it in a broader context and explains its foundational role. Providing a solid, coherent assessment of the history, current state, and potential future of the field, Foundations of Macroecology will be an essential text for students and teachers of ecology alike.

Read more less

Teacher and author Vivian Paley is highly regarded by parents, educators, and other professionals for her original insights into such seemingly everyday issues as play, story, gender, and how young children think. In "The Classrooms All Young Children Need", Patricia M. Cooper takes a synoptic view of Paley's many books and articles, charting the evolution of Paley's thinking while revealing the seminal characteristics of her teaching philosophy. This careful analysis leads Cooper to identify a pedagogical model organized around two complementary principles: a curriculum that promotes play and imagination, and the idea of classrooms as fair places where young children of every color, ability, and disposition are welcome. With timely attention paid to debates about the reduction in time for play in the early childhood classroom, the role of race in education, and No Child Left Behind, "The Classrooms All Young Children Need" will be embraced by anyone tasked with teaching our youngest pupils.

Read more less

Philosophers and historians often treat fundamental concepts like equality as if they existed only as fixed ideas found solely in the canonical texts of civilization. In Crafting Equality, Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites argue that the meaning of at least one key word—equality—has been forged in the day-to-day pragmatics of public discourse.Drawing upon little studied speeches, newspapers, magazines, and other public discourse, Condit and Lucaites survey the shifting meaning of equality from 1760 to the present as a process of interaction and negotiation among different social groups in American politics and culture. They make a powerful case for the critical role of black Americans in actively shaping what equality has come to mean in our political conversation by chronicling the development of an African-American rhetorical community. The story they tell supports a vision of equality that embraces both heterogeneity and homogeneity as necessary for maintaining the balance between liberty and property.A compelling revision of an important aspect of America's history, Crafting Equality will interest anyone wanting to better understand the role public discourse plays in affecting the major social and political issues of our times. It will also interest readers concerned with the relationship between politics and culture in America's increasingly multi-cultural society.

Read more less

Francois Furet needs little introduction. Widely considered one of the leading historians of the French Revolution, he was a maverick for his time, shining a critical light on the entrenched Marxist interpretations that prevailed during the mid-twentieth century. Shortly after his death in 1997, the New York Review of Books called him "one of the most influential men in contemporary France." Lies, Passions, and Illusions is a fitting capstone to this celebrated author's oeuvre: a late-career conversation with philosopher Paul Ricoeur on the twentieth century writ large, a century of violence and turmoil, of unprecedented wealth and progress, in which history advanced, for better or worse, in quantum leaps. This conversation would be, sadly, Furet's last - he died while Ricoeur was completing his edits. Ricoeur did not want to publish his half without Furet's approval, so what remains is Furet's alone, an astonishingly cohesive meditation on the political passions of the twentieth century. With strokes at once broad and incisive, he examines the many different trajectories that nations of the West have followed over the past hundred years. It is a dialogue with history as it happened but also as a form of thought. It is a dialogue with his critics, with himself, and with those major thinkers - from Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt - whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the tragic dramas and upheavals of the modern era. It is a testament to the crucial role of the historian, a reflection on how history is made and lived, and how the imagination is a catalyst for political change. Whether new to Furet or deeply familiar with his work, readers will find thought-provoking assessments on every page, a deeply moving look back at one of the most tumultuous periods of history and how we might learn and look forward from it.

Read more less

In Parasitism, Claude Combes explores the fascinating adaptations parasites have developed through their intimate interactions with their hosts. He begins with the biology of parasites—their life cycles, habitats, and different types of associations with their hosts. Next he discusses genetic interactions between hosts and parasites, and he ends with a section on the community ecology of parasites and their role in the evolution of their hosts. Throughout the book Combes enlivens his discussion with a wealth of concrete examples of host-parasite interactions.

Read more less

"Both Hands Tied" studies the working poor in the United States, focusing in particular on the relation between welfare and low-wage earnings among working mothers. Grounded in the experience of thirty-three women living in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, it tells the story of their struggle to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying and often state-funded jobs with inflexible schedules - and the moments when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for additional aid. Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer here examine the situations of these women in light of the 1996 national Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and other like-minded reforms - laws that ended the entitlement to welfare for those in need and provided an incentive for them to return to work. Arguing that this reform came at a time of gendered change in the labor force and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state, "Both Hands Tied" provides a stark but poignant portrait of how welfare reform afflicted poor, single-parent families, ultimately eroding the participants' economic rights and affecting their ability to care for themselves and their children.

Read more less

In the Andean city of Otavalo, Ecuador, a cultural renaissance is now taking place against a backdrop of fading farming traditions, transnational migration and an influx of new consumer goods. Recently, Otavalenos have transformed their textile trade into a prosperous tourist industry, exporting colorful weavings around the world. Tracing the connections among newly invented craft traditions, social networks and consumption patterns, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld highlights the way ethnic identities and class cultures materialize in a sensual world that includes luxurious woven belts, powerful stereos and garlic roasted "cuyes" (guinea pigs). Yet this case reaches beyond the Andes. He shows how local and global interactions intensify the cultural expression of the world's emerging "native middle classes", at times leaving behind those unable to afford the new trappings of indigenous identity. Colloredo-Mansfeld also comments on his experiences working as an artist in Otavalo. His drawings, along with numerous photographs, animate this study in economic anthropology.

Read more less

In sheer numbers, no form of government control comes close to the police stop. Each year, twelve percent of drivers in the United States are stopped by the police, and the figure is almost double among racial minorities. Police stops are among the most frequently criticized incidences of racial profiling, but while studies have shown that minorities are pulled over at higher rates, none have examined how police stops came to be encouraged and institutionalized. Pulled Over deftly traces the strange history of the investigatory police stop. The authors show that who is stopped and how they are treated convey powerful messages about citizenship and racial disparity in the United States. For African Americans, investigatory stops erode the perceived legitimacy of police stops and of the police generally, leading to decreased trust in the police and less willingness to solicit police assistance. This holds true even when police are courteous throughout the encounters and follow seemingly color-blind institutional protocols. In a country that celebrates racial equality, investigatory stops have a deleterious effect on minority communities that merits serious reconsideration. Pulled Over offers practical recommendations on how reforms can protect the rights of citizens and still effectively combat crime.

Read more less

"Sex and Salvation" chronicles the coming of age of a generation of women in Tamatave in the years that followed Madagascar's economic liberalization. Eager to forge a viable future amid poverty and rising consumerism, many young women entered the sexual economy in hope of finding a European husband. Just as many Westerners believe that young people break with the past as they enter adulthood, Malagasy citizens fear that these women have severed the connection to their history and culture. Jennifer Cole's elegant analysis shows how this notion of generational change is both wrong and consequential. It obscures the ways young people draw on long-standing ideas of gender and sexuality, it ignores how urbanites relate to their rural counterparts, and it neglects the relationship between these husband-seeking women and their elders who join Pentecostal churches. And yet, as talk about the women circulates through the city's neighborhoods, bars, Internet cafes, and churches, it teaches others new ways of being. Cole's sophisticated depiction of how a generation's coming of age contributes to social change eschews a narrow focus on crisis. Instead, she reveals how fantasies of rupture and conceptions of the changing life course shape the everyday ways that people create the future.

Read more less

In the late medieval era, pain could be a symbol of holiness, disease, sin, or truth. It could be encouragement to lead a moral life, a punishment for wrongdoing, or a method of healing. Exploring the varied depictions and descriptions of pain - from martyrdom narratives to practices of torture and surgery - "The Modulated Scream" attempts to decode this culture of suffering in the Middle Ages. Esther Cohen brings to life the cacophony of howls emerging from the written record of physicians, torturers, theologians, and mystics. In considering how people understood suffering, explained it, and meted it out, Cohen discovers that pain was imbued with multiple meanings. While interpreting pain was the province only of the rarified elite, harnessing pain for religious, moral, legal, and social purposes was a practice that pervaded all classes of medieval life. In the overlap of these contradictory attitudes about what pain was for - how it was to be understood and who should use it - Cohen reveals the distinct and often conflicting cultural traditions and practices of late medieval Europeans. Ambitious and wide-ranging, "The Modulated Scream" is intellectual history at its most acute.

Read more less

Earthquakes have taught us much about our planet's hidden structure and the forces that have shaped it. This knowledge rests not only on the recordings of seismographs, but also on the observations of eyewitnesses to destruction. During the nineteenth century, a scientific description of an earthquake was built of stories - stories from as many people in as many situations as possible. Sometimes their stories told of fear and devastation, sometimes of wonder and excitement. In "The Earthquake Observers", Deborah R. Coen acquaints readers not only with the century's most eloquent seismic commentators, including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Karl Kraus, Ernst Mach, John Muir, and William James, but also with countless other citizen-observers, many of whom were women. Coen explains how observing networks transformed an instant of panic and confusion into a field for scientific research, turning earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of the physical and human sciences. Seismology abandoned this project of citizen science with the introduction of the Richter Scale in the 1930s, only to revive it in the twenty-first century in the face of new hazards and uncertainties. "The Earthquake Observers" tells the history of this interrupted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk.

Read more less

"This book is well worth buying for its detailed summaries of the 25 studies, many of which are classic long-term projects, and for its insights into the factors determining reproductive success."—William J. Sutherland, TREE"A must read for anyone interested in evolution, mating/social systems, and population ecology."—John L. Koprowski, IJournal of Insect Behavior

Read more less

How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question.Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.

Read more less

Winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature J. M. G. Le Clezio here conjures the consciousness of Mexico, powerfully evoking the dreams that made and unmade an ancient culture. Le Clezio's haunting book takes us into the dream that was the religion of the Aztecs, a religion whose own apocalyptic visions anticipated the coming of the Spanish conquerors. Here the dream of the conquistadores rises before us, too, the glimmering idea of gold drawing Europe into the Mexican dream. Against the religion and thought of the Aztecs and the Tarascans and the Europeans in Mexico, Le Clezio also shows us those of the 'barbarians' of the north, the nomadic Indians beyond the pale of the Aztec frontier. Finally, Le Clezio's book is a dream of the present, a meditation on what in Amerindian civilizations - in their language, in their way of telling tales, of wanting to survive their own destruction - moved the poet, playwright, and actor Antonin Artaud and motivates Le Clezio in this book. His own deep identification with pre-Columbian cultures, whose faith told them the wheel of time would bring their gods and their beliefs back to them, finds fitting expression in this extraordinary book, which brings the dream around.

Read more less

Exhorting people to volunteer is part of the everyday vocabulary of American politics. Routinely, members of both major parties call for partnerships between government and nonprofit organizations. These entreaties increase dramatically during times of crisis, and the voluntary efforts of ordinary citizens are now seen as a necessary supplement to government intervention. But despite the ubiquity of the idea of volunteerism in public policy debates, analysis of its role in American governance has been fragmented. Bringing together a diverse set of disciplinary approaches, "Politics and Partnerships" is a thorough examination of the place of voluntary associations in political history and an astute investigation into contemporary experiments in reshaping that role. The essays here reveal the key role nonprofits have played in the evolution of both the workplace and welfare and illuminate the way the government's retreat from welfare has radically altered the relationship between nonprofits and corporations.

Read more less

The Sacred Harp choral singing tradition originated in the American South in the mid-nineteenth century, spread widely across the country, and continues to thrive today. Sacred Harp isn't performed but participated in, ideally in large gatherings where, as the a cappella singers face each other around a hollow square, the massed voices take on a moving and almost physical power. "I Belong to This Band, Hallelujah!" is a vivid portrait of several Sacred Harp groups and an insightful exploration of how they manage to maintain a sense of community despite their members' often profound differences. Laura Clawson's research took her to Alabama and Georgia, to Chicago and Minneapolis, and to Hollywood for a Sacred Harp performance at the Academy Awards, a potent symbol of the conflicting forces at play in the twenty-first-century incarnation of this old genre. Clawson finds that in order for Sacred Harp singers to maintain the bond forged by their love of music, they must grapple with a host of difficult issues, including how to maintain the authenticity of their tradition and how to carefully negotiate the tensions created by their disparate cultural, religious, and political beliefs.

Read more less

This text explores the complex relations between "enlightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academies and boisterous clubs are all given their due place in the landscape of enlightened Europe. The contributors examine the production of new disciplines through work with instruments and techniques; consider how institutions of public taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of Europe. Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain controversial today. Through careful scrutiny of how these values influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its sciences, this book seeks to offer an entirely new sense of the Enlightenment.

Read more less

John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough (1644-1722), was one of the greatest military commanders and statesmen in the history of England. Victorious in the Battles of Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), and countless other campaigns, Marlborough, whose political intrigues were almost as legendary as his military skill, never fought a battle he didn't win. Although he helped James II crush the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth, Marlborough later supported William of Orange against James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and brilliantly managed England's diplomatic triumphs during the War of the Spanish Succession. Marlborough also bequeathed the world another great British military strategist and diplomat - his descendant, Winston S. Churchill, who wrote this book to redeem Marlborough's reputation from Macaulay's smears. One million words long and ten years in the making, Churchill's Marlborough stands as both a literary and historical masterpiece, giving us unique insights into the Churchill of World War II, for just as Churchill's literary skill helps us understand the complexities of Marlborough's life, so too did his writing of Marlborough help Churchill master the arts of military strategy and diplomacy. This edition includes the entire text and almost all the original maps.

Read more less

The early years of film were dominated by competition between inventors in America and France, especially Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers . But while these have generally been considered the foremost pioneers of film, they were not the only crucial figures in its inception. Telling the story of the white-hot years of filmmaking in the 1890s, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema seeks to restore Robert Paul, Britain's most important early innovator in film, to his rightful place. From improving upon Edison's Kinetoscope to cocreating the first movie camera in Britain to building England's first film studio and launching the country's motion-picture industry, Paul played a key part in the history of cinema worldwide. It's not only Paul's story, however, that historian Ian Christie tells here. Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema also details the race among inventors to develop lucrative technologies and the jumbled culture of patent-snatching, showmanship, and music halls that prevailed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Both an in-depth biography and a magnificent look at early cinema and fin-de-siecle Britain, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema is a first-rate cultural history of a fascinating era of global invention, and the revelation of one of its undervalued contributors.

Read more less

What if Immanuel Kant floated down from his transcendental heights, straight through Alice's rabbit hole, and into the fabulous world of Lewis Carroll? For Ben-Ami Scharfstein this is a wonderfully instructive scenario and the perfect way to begin this wide-ranging collection of decades of startlingly synthesized thought. Combining a deep knowledge of psychology, cultural anthropology, art history, and the history of religions - not to mention philosophy - he demonstrates again and again the unpredictability of writing and thought and how they can teach us about our experiences. Scharfstein begins with essays on the nature of philosophy itself, moving from an autobiographical account of the trials of being a comparativist to philosophy's function in the outside world to the fear of death in Kant and Hume. From there he explores an impressive array of art: from China and Japan to India and the West; from an essay on sadistic and masochistic body art to one on the epistemology of the deaf and the blind. He then returns to philosophy, writing on Machiavelli and political ruthlessness, then on the ineffable, and closes with a review of Walter Kaufmann's multivolume look at the essence of humanity, Discovering the Mind. Altogether, these essays are a testament to adventurous thought, the kind that leaps to the furthest reaches of the possible.

Read more less

Kurt Wolff (1887-1963) was a singular presence in the literary world of the twentieth century, a cultural force shaping modern literature itself and pioneering significant changes in publishing. During an intense, active career that took him from Weimar Germany to New York City, where he founded Pantheon Books, Wolff nurtured an extraordinary array of writers, among them Franz Kafka, Lou Andreas-Salome, Boris Pasternak, Gunter Grass, Robert Musil, Paul Valery, Julian Green, Giuseppe Lampedusa, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. His essays and letters, many published here for the first time in English, illuminate the complex relations - between publisher and author, publisher and editor, publisher and reading public - that work at their best, as in Wolff's case, to sustain culture.

Read more less

In a culture where poetry is considered the highest form of human language, Gendun Chopel is revered as Tibet's greatest modern poet. Born in 1903 as British troops were preparing to invade his homeland, he was identified at any early age as the incarnation of a famous lama and became a Buddhist monk, excelling in the debating courtyards of the great monasteries of Tibet. At the age of thirty-one, he gave up his monk's vows and set off for India, where he would wander, often alone and impoverished, for over a decade. Returning to Tibet, he was arrested by the government of the young Dalai Lama on trumped-up charges of treason, emerging from prison three years later a broken man. He died in 1951 as troops of the People's Liberation Army marched into Lhasa. Throughout his life, from his childhood to his time in prison, Gendun Chopel wrote poetry that conveyed the events of his remarkable life. "In the Forest of Faded Wisdom" is the first comprehensive collection of his oeuvre in any language, assembling poems in both the original Tibetan and in English translation. A master of many forms of Tibetan verse, Gendun Chopel composed heartfelt hymns to the Buddha, pithy instructions for the practice of the dharma, stirring tributes to the Tibetan warrior-kings, cynical reflections on the ways of the world, and laments of a wanderer, forgotten in a foreign land. These poems exhibit the technical skill for which Gendun Chopel was known and reveal the poet to be a consummate craftsman, skilled in both Tibetan and Indian poetics. With a directness and force often at odds with the conventions of belles lettres, this is a poetry that is at once elegant and earthy.

Read more less

Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali. When you think of African American history, you think of its heroes - individuals endowed with courage and strength who are celebrated for their bold exploits and nobility of purpose. But what of black villains? Villains, just as much as heroes, have helped define the black experience. Ranging from black slaveholders and frontier outlaws to serial killers and gangsta rappers, Hoodlums examines the pivotal role of black villains in American society and popular culture. Here, William L. Van Deburg offers the most extensive treatment to date of the black badman and the challenges that this figure has posed for race relations in America. He first explores the evolution of this problematic racial stereotype in the literature of the early Republic and then probes antebellum slave laws, minstrel shows, and the works of proslavery polemicists to consider how whites conceptualized blacks as members of an inferior and dangerous race. Turning to key works by blacks themselves, from the writings of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to classic blaxploitation films like Black Caesar and The Mack, Van Deburg demonstrates how African Americans have combated such negative stereotypes and reconceptualized the idea of the badman through stories of social bandits-controversial individuals vilified by whites for their proclivity toward evil, but revered in the black community as necessarily insurgent and revolutionary.

Read more less

Although economic reasoning has infiltrated many fields in the social sciences, those who study value conflicts have resisted rational choice approaches to the subject. Instead, most contend that political conflict over cultural values is best explained by group loyalties, symbolic motives and other "nonrational" factors. In this book, Dennis Chong shows that a single model can explain how people make decisions across both social and economic realms. He argues that preferences result from a combination of psychological dispositions, which are shaped by social influences and developed over the life span, as well as costs and benefits calculated according to our desire for material gain and social acceptance. Chong's book yields insights about the circumstances under which preferences, beliefs, values, norms and group identifications are formed. Most significantly, it offers an explanation of how ingrained social norms and values can change over time in spite of the myriad forces working to maintain the status quo.

Read more less

While living in West Africa in the 1970s, John Chernoff recorded the stories of “Hawa,” a spirited and brilliant but uneducated woman whose insistence on being respected and treated fairly propelled her, ironically, into a life of marginality and luck as an “ashawo,” or bar girl. Rejecting traditional marriage options and cut off from family support, she is like many women in Africa who come to depend on the help they receive from one another, from boyfriends, and from the men they meet in bars and nightclubs. Refusing to see herself as a victim, Hawa embraces the freedom her lifestyle permits and seeks the broadest experience available to her. In Hustling Is Not Stealing and its follow-up, Exchange Is Not Robbery, a chronicle of exploitation is transformed by verbal art into an ebullient comedy. In Hustling Is Not Stealing, Hawa is a playful warrior struggling against circumstances in Ghana and Togo. In Exchange Is Not Robbery, Hawa returns to her native Burkina Faso, where she achieves greater control over her life but faces new difficulties. As a woman making sacrifices to live independently, Hawa sees her own situation become more complex as she confronts an atmosphere in Burkina Faso that is in some ways more challenging than the one she left behind, and the moral ambiguities of her life begin to intensify. Combining elements of folklore and memoir, Hawa’s stories portray the diverse social landscape of West Africa. Individually the anecdotes can be funny, shocking, or poignant; assembled together they offer a sweeping critical and satirical vision.

Read more less

Ancient Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now western Iraq and eastern Syria, is considered to be the cradle of civilization - home of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, as well as the great Code of Hammurabi. The Code was only part of a rich juridical culture from 2200 to 1600 BCE that saw the invention of writing and the development of its relationship to law, among other remarkable firsts. Though ancient history offers inexhaustible riches, Dominique Charpin focuses here on the legal systems of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and offers considerable insight into how writing and the law evolved together to forge the principles of authority, precedent, and documentation that dominate us to this day. As legal codes throughout the region evolved through advances in cuneiform writing, kings and governments were able to stabilize their control over distant realms and impose a common language - which gave rise to complex social systems overseen by magistrates, judges, and scribes that eventually became the vast empires of history books. Sure to attract any reader with an interest in the ancient Near East, as well as rhetoric, legal history, and classical studies, this book is an innovative account of the intertwined histories of law and language.

Read more less

Carlos A. Forment's aim in this highly ambitious work is to write the book that Tocqueville would have written had he traveled to Latin America instead of the United States. Forment pores over countless newspapers, partisan pamphlets, tabloids, journals, private letters, and travelogues to show in this study how citizens of Latin America established strong democratic traditions in their countries through the practice of democracy in their everyday lives. This first volume of Democracy in Latin America considers the development of democratic life in Mexico and Peru from independence to the late 1890s. Forment traces the emergence of hundreds of political, economic, and civic associations run by citizens in both nations and shows how these organizations became models of and for democracy in the face of dictatorship and immense economic hardship. His is the first book to show the presence in Latin America of civic democracy, something that gave men and women in that region an alternative to market-and state-centered forms of life.

Read more less

An academic career in the biological sciences typically demands well over a decade of technical training. So it's ironic that when a scholar reaches one of the most critical stages in that career - the search for a job following graduate work - he or she receives little or no formal preparation. Instead, students are thrown into the job market with only cursory guidance on how to search for and land a position. Now there's help. Carefully, clearly, and with a welcome sense of humor, "The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology" leads graduate students and postdoctoral fellows through the perils and rewards of their first job search. The authors - who collectively have mentored students and served on hiring committees for decades - have honed their advice in workshops delivered to anxious audiences at biology meetings across the country. The resulting volume covers everything from how to pack an overnight bag without wrinkling a suit to the decision-making processes of hiring committees to selecting the right job to apply for in the first place. The authors have taken care to make their advice useful to all areas of academic biology, including genetics, organismal biology, and evolutionary biology, and they give tips on how applicants can tailor their approaches to institutions ranging from major research universities to small private colleges. Written in a lively, positive style, "The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology" will be indispensable to graduate students and postdocs as they enter that domain red in tooth and claw: the job market.

Read more less

Nobel laureate and scientific luminary Enrico Fermi (1901-54) was a pioneering nuclear physicist whose contributions to the field were numerous, profound, and lasting. Best known for his involvement with the Manhattan Project and his work at Los Alamos that led to the first self-sustained nuclear reaction and, ultimately, to the production of electric power and plutonium for atomic weapons, Fermi and his work continue to color the character of the sciences at the University of Chicago. During his tenure as professor of physics at the Institute for Nuclear Studies, Fermi attracted an extraordinary scientific faculty and many talented students-ten Nobel Prizes were awarded to faculty or students under his tutelage. Fermi Remembered combines essays and newly commissioned reminiscences with private material from Fermi's research notebooks, correspondence, speech outlines, and teaching to document the profound and enduring significance of Fermi's life and labors. The volume features extensive archival material - including correspondence between Fermi and physicist Leo Szilard and a letter from Harry Truman - with new introductions that provide context for both the history of physics and the academic tradition at the University of Chicago.

Read more less

The Vaqueiros de Alzada, a cattle-herding people in the Asturian mountains of Spain, have one of the highest suicide rates in Europe—and an attitude toward death that gives this statistic unusual meaning. This World, Other Worlds considers death among the Vaqueiros as a central cultural fact which reveals local ideas about the origin and destiny of humans, the relations of humans and animals, the configuration of the universe, and the nature of society. Interested chiefly in the conceptual and meaningful aspects of death, María Cátedra focuses on the cultural resources with which the Vaqueiros confront their own mortality—how they experience death and what this reveals about the way they see this world and other worlds. Applying sensitive ethnographic insight to a rich body of oral testimony, Cátedra discloses an unsuspected symbolic universe native to the Vaqueiros. Death is seen here in close, coherent relation to pain, age, and suffering; sickness and suicide, one must understand the cultural valuation of different ways of dying and the conditions under which suicides take place. To understand what it means to be a Vaqueiro is to understand how suicide can be perceived by a people as acceptable. A groundbreaking work in European ethnography, This World, Other Worlds takes symbolic analysis to a new level. In its illumination of local conceptions of death, grace, and sainthood, the book also makes a substantial contribution to the anthropology of religion.

Read more less

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, "I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club." Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture - civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors - to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. "Beautiful Democracy" explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, "Beautiful Democracy" ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.

Read more less

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, "I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club." Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture - civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors - to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. "Beautiful Democracy" explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, "Beautiful Democracy" ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.

Read more less

The Open Mind chronicles the development and promulgation of a scientific vision of the rational, creative, and autonomous self, demonstrating how this self became a defining feature of Cold War culture. Jamie Cohen-Cole illustrates how from 1945 to 1965 policy makers and social critics used the idea of an open-minded human nature to advance centrist politics. They reshaped intellectual culture and instigated nationwide educational reform that promoted more open, and indeed more human, minds. The new field of cognitive science was central to this project, as it used popular support for open-mindedness to overthrow the then-dominant behaviorist view that the mind either could not be studied scientifically or did not exist. Cognitive science also underwrote the political implications of the open mind by treating it as the essential feature of human nature. While the open mind unified America in the first two decades after World War II, between 1965 and 1975 battles over the open mind fractured American culture as the ties between political centrism and the scientific account of human nature began to unravel. During the late 1960s, feminists and the New Left repurposed Cold War era psychological tools to redefine open-mindedness as a characteristic of left-wing politics. As a result, once liberal intellectuals became neoconservative, and in the early 1970s, struggles against open-mindedness gave energy and purpose to the right wing.

Read more less

Markets are artifacts of language - so Douglas R. Holmes argues in this deeply researched look at central banks and the people who run them. Working at the intersection of anthropology, linguistics, and economics, he shows how central bankers have been engaging in communicative experiments that predate the financial crisis and continue to be refined amid its unfolding turmoil - experiments that do not merely describe the economy, but actually create its distinctive features. Holmes examines the New York District Branch of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, and the Bank of England, among others, and shows how bank officials have created a new monetary regime that relies on collaboration with the public to achieve the ends of monetary policy. Central bankers, Holmes argues, have shifted the conceptual anchor of monetary affairs away from standards such as gold or fixed exchange rates and toward an evolving relationship with the public, one rooted in sentiments and expectations. Going behind closed doors to reveal the intellectual world of central banks, Economy of Words offers provocative new insights into the way our economic circumstances are conceptualized and ultimately managed.

Read more less

Fifteen years in the making, "Hyperpolitics" is an interactive dictionary offering a wholly original approach for understanding and working with the most central concepts in political science. Designed and authored by two of the discipline's most distinguished scholars, its purpose is to provide its readers with fresh critical insights about what informs these political concepts, as well as a method by which readers - and especially students - can unpack and reconstruct them on their own. rnational in scope, "Hyperpolitics" draws upon a global vocabulary in order to turn complex ideas into an innovative teaching aid. Its companion open access website has already been widely acknowledged in the fields of education and political science and will continue to serve as a formidable hub for the book's audience. Much more than a dictionary and enhanced by dynamic graphics, "Hyperpolitics" introduces an ingenious means of understanding complicated concepts that will be an invaluable tool for scholars and students alike.

Read more less

At fifteen, Victor Rios found himself a human target flat on his ass amid a hail of shotgun fire, desperate for money and a place on the street. Faced with the choice of escalating a drug turf war or eking out a living elsewhere, he turned to a teacher, who mentored him and helped him find a job at an auto shop. That job would alter the course of his whole life putting him on the road to college and eventually a PhD. Now, Rios is a rising star, hailed for his work studying the lives of African American and Latino youth. In Human Targets, Rios takes us to the streets of California, where we encounter young men who find themselves in much the same situation as fifteen-year-old Victor. We follow young gang members into schools, homes, community organizations, and detention facilities, watch them interact with police, grow up to become fathers, get jobs, get rap sheets and in some cases get killed. What is it that sets apart young people like Rios who succeed and survive from the ones who don't? Rios makes a powerful case that the traditional good kid/bad kid, street kid/decent kid dichotomy is much too simplistic, arguing instead that authorities and institutions help create these identities and that they can play an instrumental role in providing young people with the resources for shifting between roles. In Rios's account, to be a poor Latino youth is to be a human target victimized and considered an enemy by others, viewed as a threat to law enforcement and schools, and treated with stigma, disrepute, and punishment. That has to change. This is not another sensationalistic account of gang bangers. Instead, the book is a powerful look at how authority figures succeed and fail at seeing the multi-faceted identities of at-risk youths, youths who succeed and fail at demonstrating to the system that they are ready to change their lives. In our post-Ferguson era, Human Targets is essential reading.

Read more less

Public policy in the United States is the product of decisions made by more than 500,000 elected officials, the vast majority of them elected on days other than Election Day. And because far fewer voters turn out for off-cycle elections, that means the majority of officials in America are elected by a politically motivated minority of Americans. Sarah F. Anzia is the first to systemically address the effects of election timing on political outcomes, and her findings are eye-opening. The low turnout for off-cycle elections, Anzia argues, increases the influence of organized interest groups like teachers' unions and municipal workers. While such groups tend to vote at high rates regardless of when the election is held, the low turnout in off-cycle years enhances the effectiveness of their mobilization efforts and makes them a proportionately larger bloc. Throughout American history, the issue of election timing has been a contentious one. Anzia's book traces efforts by interest groups and political parties to change the timing of elections to their advantage, resulting in the electoral structures we have today. Ultimately, what might seem at first glance to be mundane matters of scheduling are better understood as tactics designed to distribute political power, determining who has an advantage in the electoral process and who will control government at the municipal, county, and state levels.

Read more less

The urgent demand for housing after World War I fueled a boom in residential construction that led to historic peaks in home ownership. Foreclosures at the time were rare, and when they did happen, lenders could quickly recoup their losses by selling into a strong market. But no mortgage system is equipped to deal with credit problems on the scale of the Great Depression. As foreclosures quintupled, it became clear that the mortgage system of the 1920s was not up to the task, and borrowers, lenders, and real estate professionals sought action at the federal level. Well Worth Saving tells the story of the disastrous housing market during the Great Depression and the extent to which an immensely popular New Deal relief program, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), was able to stem foreclosures by buying distressed mortgages from lenders and refinancing them. Drawing on historical records and modern statistical tools, Price Fishback, Jonathan Rose, and Kenneth Snowden investigate important unanswered questions to provide an unparalleled view of the mortgage loan industry throughout the 1920s and early '30s. Combining this with the stories of those involved, the book offers a clear understanding of the HOLC within the context of the housing market in which it operated, including an examination of how the incentives and behaviors at play throughout the crisis influenced the effectiveness of policy. More than eighty years after the start of the Great Depression, when politicians have called for similar programs to quell the current mortgage crisis, this accessible account of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation holds invaluable lessons for our own time.

Read more less

In "The Death of the American Trial", distinguished legal scholar Robert P. Burns makes an impassioned case for reversing the rapid decline of the trial before we lose one of our public culture's greatest achievements. As a practice that is adapted for modern times yet rooted in ancient wisdom, the trial is uniquely suited to balance the tensions - between idealism and realism, experts and citizens, contextual judgment and reliance on rules - that define American culture. Arguing that many observers make a grave mistake by taking a complacent or even positive view of the trial's demise, Burns concludes by laying out the catastrophic consequences of losing an institution that so perfectly embodies democratic governance.

Read more less

Stephen Bunker challenges the image of peasants as passive victims and argues that coffee growers in the Bugisu District of Uganda, because they own land and may choose which crops to produce, maintain an unusual degree of economic and political independence. Focusing on peasant struggles for market control over coffee exports in Bugisu from colonial times through the reign and overthrow of Idi Amin, Bunker shows that these freeholding peasants acted collectively and used the state's dependence on coffee export revenues to effectively influence and veto government programs inimical to their interests. Bunker's work vividly portrays the small victories and great trials of ordinary people struggling to control their own economic destiny while resisting the power of the world economy.

Read more less

"As he usually does, Professor Buchanan has produced an interesting and provocative piece of work. [Cost and Choice] starts off as an essay in the history of cost theory; the central ideas of the book are traced to Davenport and Knight in the United States, and to a series of distinguished writers associated at various times with the London School of Economics. The author emerges from this discussion with what can be described as the ultimate in subjectivist cost doctrines. . . . Economists should learn the lessons offered to us in this little book—and learn them well. It can save them from serious errors."—William J. Baumol, Journal of Economic Literature

Read more less