Search results for ""the university of chicago press""

This study examines the social origins of interest group politics in the USA. Between 1890 and 1925, a system centred on elections and party organizations was partially transformed by increasingly prominent legislative and administrative policy-making, and by the insistent participation of nonpartisan organizations, including farmers, workers and women, who invented strategies to circumvent the parties. Voters learned how to monitor legislative processes, to hold their representives accountable at the polls, and to institutionalize their ongoing participation in shaping policy. The text analyzes organizational politics in three American states, California, Washington and Wisconsin, seeking to demonstrate how the political opportunity structure of federalism allowed regional innovations to exert leverage on national political institutions.

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Uses the history of the university and reframes the Protestant Ethic to consider the conditions of knowledge production in the world. The author argues that the research university developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication.

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In the most comprehensive analysis to date of the world of open air marketplaces of West Africa, Gracia Clark studies the market women of Kumasi, Ghana, in order to understand the key social forces that generate, maintain, and continually reshape the shifting market dynamics.Probably the largest of its kind in West Africa, the Kumasi Central Market houses women whose positions vary from hawkers of meals and cheap manufactured goods to powerful wholesalers, who control the flow of important staples. Drawing on more than four years of field research, during which she worked alongside several influential market "Queens", Clark explains the economic, political, gender, and ethnic complexities involved in the operation of the marketplace and examines the resourcefulness of the market women in surviving the various hazards they routinely encounter, from coups d'etat to persistent sabotage of their positions from within.

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During the middle phase of his career, Guiseppe Verdi adopted new compositional procedures to create some of his best-known works. Focusing on the operas he composed during this period, this volume explores Verdi's work from three interlinked perspectives: studies of the original source material, cross-disciplinary analysis of musical and textual issues, and the relationship of performance practice to Verdi's musical and dramatic conception. In addition to offering new insights into operas such as "Il Trovatore", "La Traviata" and "Un Ballo in Maschera", this text also highlights works such as "Luisa Miller" and "Les Vepres Siciliennes".

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European and American scholars from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries thought that all societies passed through the same developmental stages, from primitive to advanced. Implicit in this developmental paradigm - one that has affected generations of thought-was the assumption that one could "read history sideways." That is, one could see what the earlier stages of a modern Western society looked like by examining contemporaneous so-called primitive societies in other parts of the world. In Reading History Sideways, Arland Thornton demonstrates how this approach, though long since discredited, has permeated Western ideas about the family. Further, its domination of social science for centuries caused the misinterpretation of Western trends in family, marriage, fertility, and parent-child relations. Revisiting the "developmental fallacy," Thornton traces its central role in changes in the Western world, from marriage to gender roles to adolescent sexuality. Through public policies, aid programs, and colonialism, it continues to reshape families in non-Western societies as well.

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Edward Chiera was that most remarkable of men, a competent and respected scholar possessed of an ardent desire to make his research readily and entertainingly available to laymen. More remarkable, Chiera had extraordinary gifts to equal to his desire. They Wrote on Clay combines fascinatingly the fruits of sound and painstaking archeology with the natural-born storyteller's art. As transmitted by Chiera, the message of the recently discovered Babylonian clay tablets becomes an absorbing exrusion into the common life of a vanished civilization. Few will read They Wrote on Clay without becoming infected with something of Chiera's love for the rich archeological lore of the ancient Near East. "The book presents, briefly and clearly, a vivid picture of a long-dead people who in numerous ways were very like ourselves."—L. M. Field, New York Times "No mystery story can be as exciting."—Harper's "Plainly and fetchingly written."—New Republic

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To celebrate the centennial of Poetry, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman combed the magazine's vast archives to create a new kind of anthology, energized by a self-imposed limitation to one hundred poems. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive - or even to offer the most familiar works - they have assembled a collection of poems that, in their juxtapositions, echo across a century of poetry. The result is an anthology like no other, a celebration of idiosyncrasy and invention, a vital monument to an institution that refuses to be static, and most of all, a book that lovers of poetry will devour, debate, and keep close at hand.

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Conquered in 1492 and colonized by invading Castilians, the city and kingdom of Granada faced radical changes imposed by its occupiers throughout the first half of the sixteenth century - including the forced conversion of its native Muslim population. Written by Francisco Nunez Muley, one of Granada's New Christians, this extraordinary letter lodges a clear-sighted, impassioned protest against the unreasonable and strongly assimilationist laws that required all Granadans to dress, speak, eat, marry, celebrate festivals, and bury their dead exactly as the Castilian settler population did. Rendered into faithful English prose by Vincent Barletta, Nunez Muley's account is an invaluable example of how Granada's former Muslims made active use of the written word to challenge and openly resist the progressively intolerant policies of the Spanish Crown. Timely and resonant - given current debates concerning Islam, minorities, and cultural and linguistic assimilation - this edition provides scholars in a range of fields with a vivid and early example of resistance in the face of oppression.

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In 1838 Charles Darwin jotted in a notebook, 'He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.' "Baboon Metaphysics" is Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth's fascinating response to Darwin's challenge.Cheney and Seyfarth set up camp in Botswana's Okavango Delta, where they could intimately observe baboons and their social world. Baboons live in groups of up to 150, including a handful of males and eight or nine matrilineal families of females. Such numbers force baboons to form a complicated mix of short-term bonds for mating and longer-term friendships based on careful calculations of status and individual need.But "Baboon Metaphysics" is concerned with much more than just baboons' social organization - Cheney and Seyfarth aim to fully comprehend the intelligence that underlies it. Using innovative field experiments, the authors learn that for baboons, just as for humans, family and friends hold the key to mitigating the ill effects of grief, stress, and anxiety.Written with a scientist's precision and a nature-lover's eye, "Baboon Metaphysics" gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.

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In this impassioned and judicious work, R. Bruce Hull argues that environmentalism will never achieve its goals unless it sheds its fundamentalist logic. The movement is too bound up in polarizing ideologies that pit humans against nature, conservation against development, and government regulation against economic growth. Only when we acknowledge the infinite perspectives on how people should relate to nature will we forge solutions that are respectful to both humanity and the environment. Infinite Nature explores some of these myriad perspectives, from the scientific understandings proffered by anthropology, evolution, and ecology, to the promise of environmental responsibility offered by technology and economics, to the designs of nature envisioned in philosophy, law, and religion. Along the way, Hull maintains that the idea of nature is social: in order to reach the common ground where sustainable and thriving communities are possible, we must accept that many natures can and do exist.

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In Agewise, renowned cultural critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette reveals that much of what we dread about aging is actually the result of ageism - which we can, and should, battle as strongly as we do racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry. A bracing, controversial call for a movement of resistance, Agewise will surprise, enlighten, and, perhaps most important, bring hope to readers of all ages.

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The concept of an encyclopedic museum was born of the enlightenment, a manifestation of European society's growing belief that the spread of knowledge, promotion of intellectual inquiry, and trust in individual agency were crucial to human development and the future of a rational society. But in recent years, encyclopedic museums have been under attack as little more than relics and promoters of imperialism. Could it be that the encyclopedic museum has outlived its usefulness? With Museums Matter, James Cuno, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust and former president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, replies with a resounding "No!" He takes us on a brief tour of the modern museum, from the creation of the British Museum - the archetypal encyclopedic collection - to the present, when major museums host millions of visitors annually and play a significant role in the cultural lives of their cities. Along the way, Cuno acknowledges the legitimate questions about the role of museums in nation building and imperialism, but he argues strenuously that even a truly national museum like the Louvre can't help but open visitors' eyes and minds to the wide diversity of world cultures and the stunning art that is our common heritage. Ultimately Cuno makes a powerful case for the encyclopedic museum as a truly cosmopolitan institution, promoting tolerance, understanding, and a shared sense of history-values that are essential in our ever more globalized age.

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In "Neoliberal Frontiers", Brenda Chalfin presents an ethnographic examination of the day-to-day practices of the officials of Ghana's Customs Service, exploring the impact of neoliberal restructuring and integration into the global economy on Ghanaian sovereignty. From the revealing vantage point of the customs office, Chalfin discovers a fascinating inversion of our assumptions about neoliberal transformation: bureaucrats and local functionaries, government offices, checkpoints, and registries are typically held to be the targets of reform, but Chalfin finds that these figures and sites of authority act as the engine for changes in state sovereignty. Ghana has served as a model of reform for the neoliberal establishment, making it an ideal site for Chalfin to explore why the restructuring of a state on the global periphery portends shifts that occur in all corners of the world. At once a foray into international political economy, politics, and political anthropology, "Neoliberal Frontiers" is an innovative interdisciplinary leap forward for ethnographic writing, as well as an eloquent addition to the literature on postcolonial Africa.

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In this text, the author demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on close analyses of conversational speech, as well as written fiction and non-fiction, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination. Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many linguistic phenomena, such as pronouns, tense, clause structure and intonation, as well as stylistic usages, such as the historical present and the free indirect style. While the book focuses on English, there are also discussions of the North American Indian language, Seneca, and the music of Mozart and of the Seneca people.

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This is a collection of the letters of Laura Cereta (1469-1499), which present feminist issues in a predominantly male environment. Cereta's works circulated widely in Italy, and in them she explores the history of women's contributions to the intellectual and political life of Europe. Cereta argues against the slavery of women in marriage and for the rights of women to higher education, the same issues which have occupied women of later centuries. The letters also furnish a detailed portrait of an early modern woman's private experience, for Cereta addressed many letters to a close circle of family and friends, discussing highly personal concerns, such as her difficult relationships with her mother and husband. The letters provide a testament to an individual woman and to enduring feminist concerns.

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In these three lectures, Cavell situates Emerson at an intersection of three crossroads: a place where both philosophy and literature pass; where the two traditions of English and German philosophy shun one another; where the cultures of America and Europe unsettle one another. "Cavell's 'readings' of Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Emerson and other thinkers surely deepen our understanding of them, but they do much more: they offer a vision of what life can be and what culture can mean...These profound lectures are a wonderful place to make [Cavell's] acquaintance."--Hilary Putnam

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In recent decades game theory-the mathematics of rational decision-making by interacting individuals-has assumed a central place in our understanding of capitalist markets, the evolution of social behavior in animals, and even the ethics of altruism and fairness in human beings. With game theory's ubiquity, however, has come a great deal of misunderstanding. Critics of the contemporary social sciences view it as part of an unwelcome trend toward the marginalization of historicist and interpretive styles of inquiry, and many accuse its proponents of presenting a thin and empirically dubious view of human choice. The World the Game Theorists Made seeks to explain the ascendency of game theory, focusing on the poorly understood period between the publication of John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern's seminal Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the theory's revival in economics in the 1980s. Drawing on a diverse collection of institutional archives, personal correspondence and papers, and interviews, Paul Erickson shows how game theory offered social scientists, biologists, military strategists, and others a common, flexible language that could facilitate wide-ranging thought and debate on some of the most critical issues of the day.

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In recent decades game theory - the mathematics of rational decision-making by interacting individuals - has assumed a central place in our understanding of capitalist markets, the evolution of social behavior in animals, and even the ethics of altruism and fairness in human beings. With game theory's ubiquity, however, has come a great deal of misunderstanding Critics of the contemporary social sciences view it as part of an unwelcome trend toward the marginalization of historicist and interpretive styles of inquiry, and many accuse its proponents of presenting a thin and empirically dubious view of human choice. The World the Game Theorists Made seeks to explain the ascendency of game theory, focusing on the poorly understood period between the publication of John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern's seminal Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the theory's revival in economics in the 1980s. Drawing on a diverse collection of institutional archives, personal correspondence and papers, and interviews, Paul Erickson shows how game theory offered social scientists, biologists, military strategists, and others a common, flexible language that could facilitate wide-ranging thought and debate on some of the most critical issues of the day.

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Is it possible to trace the footprints of the historical Sokrates in Athens? Was there really an individual named Romulus, and if so, when did he found Rome? Is the tomb beneath the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica home to the apostle Peter? To answer these questions, we need both dirt and words - that is, archaeology and history. Bringing the two fields into conversation, Artifact and Artifice offers an exciting excursion into the relationship between ancient history and archaeology and reveals the possibilities and limitations of using archaeological evidence in writing about the past. Jonathan M. Hall employs a series of well-known cases to investigate how historians may ignore or minimize material evidence that contributes to our knowledge of antiquity unless it correlates with information gleaned from texts. Dismantling the myth that archaeological evidence cannot impart information on its own, he illuminates the methodological and political principles at stake in using such evidence and describes how the disciplines of history and classical archaeology may be enlisted to work together. He also provides a brief sketch of how the discipline of classical archaeology evolved and considers its present and future role in historical approaches to antiquity. Written in clear prose and packed with maps, photos, and drawings, Artifact and Artifice will be an essential book for undergraduates in the humanities.

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This work provides an analysis of a tradition of American women's captivity narrative that ranges across three centuries, from Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson's abduction by Narragansett Indians to Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Examining more than 60 accounts by women captives, as well as novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's 18th-century classic "Rueben and Rachel" to modern mass-market romances, the author investigates paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find freedom from stereotypical roles as helpless, dependent, sexually vulnerable and xenophobic. In their condemnations of their non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny, and instead finds in them an appeal of a much different nature: as all-too-rare stories of imaginative challenges to rigid gender roles and racial ideologies. Whether the women of these stories resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or eventually choose to live among their captors, they end up with the power to be critical of both cultures. Castiglia shows that these compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent explorations of cultural divisions and differences, have significant implications for current critical investigations into the construction of gender, race and nation.

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Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world—from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism—one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the “felt” experience even something worth fighting for? In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before. As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself. This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.

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In this portrait of the everyday world of lesbian and gay relationships, Christopher Carrington captures the experiences of creating and maintaining a home and a "chosen" family. Observing lesbians and gay men as they go about their daily routines, Carrington unveils the complex, frequently hidden, and sometimes artful ways that gay people make a family and home for themselves. Based on a careful analysis of interviews and field evidence, "No Place Like Home" demonstrates how gay and lesbian couples attempt to strike a balance between work and family obligations, and how they must also struggle against forces undermining their relationships. Carrington skillfully addresses the conflicts that surround domestic tasks and shows how gay and lesbian couples sometimes hold unspoken or unrealistic expectations about household and family life. Carrington brings such expectations into the open, and in the process he challenges many stereotypes about gay and lesbian family life, from the myth of gay family affluence to the notion that such relationships are beacons of equality. He argues that family life really varies by class, gender, race, occupation, and neighborhood. Finally, with one eye on the day-to-day domestic lives of diverse gay and lesbian households and the other eye on the public policy options now emerging to address lesbian and gay family life, Carrington makes the case for expanding domestic partnership policies instead of attaining legal marriage as the ideal solution for achieving happiness, equity, and longevity for lesbian and gay families.

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In this multifaceted work, John Carman and Vasudha Narayanan clarify historical developments in South Asian religion and make important contributions to the methodology of textual interpretation and the comparative study of world religions.

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This text explores three of Bernini's baroque chapels to show how Bernini achieved his effects. Careri examines the ways in which the artist integrated the disparate forms of architecture, painting and sculpture into a coherant space for devotion, and then shows how this accomplishment was understood by religious practitioners. In the Fonseca Chapel, the Albertoni Chapel and the church of Saint Andrea al Quirinale, all in Rome, Careri identifies three types of ensemble and links each to a particular spiritual journey. Using contemporary theories in anthropology, film and reception aesthetics, he shows how Bernini's formal mechanisms established an emotional dynamic between the beholder and a specific arrangement of forms.

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Here is the unabridged version of the classic theoretical study of voting behavior, originally published in 1960. It is a standard reference in the field of electoral research, presenting formulations of the theoretical issues that have been the focus of scholarly publication. No single study matches the study of The American Voter.

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Philosophers of science traditionally have ignored the details of scientific research, and the result has often been theories that lack relevance either to science or to philosophy in general. In this volume, leading philosophers of biology discuss the limitations of this tradition and the advantages of the "naturalistic turn"—the idea that the study of science is itself a scientific enterprise and should be conducted accordingly. This innovative book presents candid, informal debates among scholars who examine the benefits and problems of studying science in the same way that scientists study the natural world. Callebaut achieves the effect of face-to-face engagement through separate interviews with participants. Contributors include William Bechtel, Robert Brandon, Richard M. Burian, Donald T. Campbell, Patricia Churchland, Jon Elster, Ronald N. Giere, David L. Hull, Philip Kitcher, Karin Knorr Cetina, Bruno Latour, Richard Levins, Richard C. Lewontin, Elisabeth Lloyd, Helen Longino, Thomas Nickles, Henry C. Plotkin, Robert J. Richards, Alexander Rosenberg, Michael Ruse, Dudley Shapere, Elliott Sober, Ryan Tweney, and William Wimsatt. "Why can't we have both theoretical ecology and natural histories, lovingly done?"—Philip Kitcher "Don't underestimate the arrogance of philosophers!"—Elisabeth Lloyd

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One of the great challenges now facing education reformers in the United States is how to devise a consistent and intelligent framework for instruction that will work across the nation's notoriously fragmented and politically conflicted school systems. Various programs have tried to do that, but only a few have succeeded. Improvement by Design looks at three different programs, seeking to understand why two of them - America's Choice and Success for All - worked, and why the third - Accelerated Schools Project - did not. The authors identify four critical puzzles that the successful programs were able to solve: design, implementation, improvement, and sustainability. Pinpointing the specific solutions that clearly improved instruction, they identify the key elements that all successful reform programs share. Offering urgently needed guidance for state and local school systems as they attempt to respond to future reform proposals, Improvement by Design gets America one step closer to truly successful education systems.

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Nearly the whole of America's partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. Policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions - because they are competitively driven - are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. Decades of research have shown that students at private schools score, on average, at higher levels than students do at public schools. Drawing on two large-scale, nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show, however, that this difference is more than explained by demographics-private school students largely come from more privileged backgrounds, offering greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the authors go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones, and the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion-autonomy - may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Offering facts, not ideologies, The Public School Advantage reveals that education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

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Eight of the last twelve presidents were millionaires when they took office. The figure is above fifty percent among current Supreme Court justices, all nine of whom graduated from either Harvard or Yale. Millionaires also control Congress, where a background in business or law is the norm and the average member of the House or Senate has spent less than two percent of his or her adult life in a working-class job. Why is it that most politicians in America are so much better off than the people who elect them - and does the social class divide between citizens and their representatives matter? With White-Collar Government, Nicholas Carnes answers this question with a resounding - and disturbing - yes. Legislators' socioeconomic backgrounds, he shows, have a profound impact not only on how they view the issues but also on the choices they make in office. Scant representation from among the working class almost guarantees that the policy-making process will be skewed toward outcomes that favor the upper class. It matters that the wealthiest Americans set the tax rates for the wealthy, that white-collar professionals choose the minimum wage for blue-collar workers, and that people who have always had health insurance decide whether to help those without. And while there is no one cause for this crisis of representation, Carnes shows that the problem does not stem from a lack of qualified candidates from among the working class. The solution, he argues, must involve a variety of changes, from the equalization of campaign funding to a shift in the types of candidates the parties support. If we want a government for the people, we have to start working toward a government that is truly by the people. White-Collar Government challenges long-held notions about the causes of political inequality in the United States and speaks to enduring questions about representation and political accountability

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Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope's digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely on handmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of hand-drawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim investigates hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers.

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Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. military found itself in a battle with a lethal and adaptive insurgency, where the divisions between enemy and ally were ambiguous at best, and working with the local population was essential for day-to-day survival. From the lessons they learned during multiple tours of duty in Iraq, two American veterans have penned "The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa", an instructional parable of counterinsurgency that addresses the difficulties of war in the postmodern era. In this tactical primer based on the military classic "The Defence of Duffer's Drift", a young officer deployed for the first time in Iraq receives ground-level lessons about urban combat, communications technology, and high-powered weaponry in an environment where policy meets reality. Over the course of six dreams, the inexperienced soldier fights the same battle again and again, learning each time - the hard way - which false assumptions and misconceptions he needs to discard in order to help his men avoid being killed or captured. As the protagonist grapples with the consequences of his mistakes, he develops a keen understanding of counterinsurgency fundamentals and the potential pitfalls of working with the native population. Accompanied here by the original novella that inspired it, "The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa" offers an invaluable resource for cadets and junior military leaders - as well as general readers seeking a deeper understanding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as Swinton's classic has been a hallmark of military instruction, "The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa" will help draw the road map for counterinsurgency in the postmodern world.

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In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility - the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time. Hegel's approach to art has been influential in a number of different contexts, but in a twist of historical irony Hegel would die just before the most radical artistic revolution in history: modernism. In After the Beautiful, Robert B. Pippin, looking at modernist paintings by artists such as Edouard Manet and Paul Cezanne through Hegel's lens, does what Hegel never had the chance to do. While Hegel could never engage modernist painting, he did have an understanding of modernity, and in it art was "a thing of the past," no longer an important vehicle of self-understanding and no longer an indispensable expression of human meaning. Pippin offers a sophisticated exploration of Hegel's position and shows that, had Hegel known how the social institutions of his day would ultimately fail to achieve his own version of genuine equality-a mutuality of recognition - he would have had to explore a different role for art in modernity. After laying this groundwork, Pippin goes on to illuminate the dimensions of Hegel's aesthetic approach via the works of Manet, drawing on art historians T. J. Clark and Michael Fried, and concludes with a look at Cezanne to explore the relationship between Hegel and the philosopher who would challenge Hegel's account of both modernity and art - Martin Heidegger. Elegantly interweaving philosophy and art history, After the Beautiful is a stunning reassessment of the modernist project and what it means in general for art to have a history. It is a testament, via Hegel, to the distinctive philosophical achievements of modernist art in the unsettled, tumultuous era we have inherited.

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State capitals are an indelible part of the American psyche, spatial representations of state power and national identity. Learning them by heart is a rite of passage in grade school, a pedagogical exercise that emphasizes the importance of committing place-names to memory. But geographers have yet to analyze state capitals in any depth. In American Capitals, Christian Montes takes us on a well-researched journey across America - from Augusta to Sacramento, Albany to Baton Rouge - shedding light along the way on the historical circumstances that led to their appointment, their success or failure, and their evolution over time. While all state capitals have a number of characteristics in common - as symbols of the state, as embodiments of political power and decision making, as public spaces with private interests - Montes does not interpret them through a single lens, in large part because of the differences in their spatial and historical evolutionary patterns. Some have remained small, while others have evolved into bustling metropolises, and Montes explores the dynamics of change and growth. All but eleven state capitals were established in the nineteenth century, thirty-five before 1861, but, rather astonishingly, only eight of the fifty states have maintained their original capitals. Despite their revered status as the most monumental and historical cities in America, capitals come from surprisingly humble beginnings, often plagued by instability, conflict, hostility, and corruption. Montes reminds us of the period in which they came about, "an era of pioneer and idealized territorial vision," coupled with a still-evolving American citizenry and democracy.

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Communism, once heralded as the "radiant future" of all humanity, has now become part of Eastern Europe's past. What does the record say about the legacy of communism as an organizational system? Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukacs consider this question from the standpoint of the Hungarian working class. Between 1983 and 1990 the authors carried out intensive studies in two core Hungarian industries, machine building and steel production, to produce the first extended participant-observation study of work and politics in state socialism. "A fascinating and engagingly written eyewitness report on proletarian life in the waning years of goulash communism. . . . A richly rewarding book, one that should interest political scientists in a variety of subfields, from area specialists and comparativists to political economists, as well as those interested in Marxist and post-Marxist theory."—Elizabeth Kiss, American Political Science Review"A very rich book. . . . It does not merely offer another theory of transition, but also presents a clear interpretive scheme, combined with sociological theory and vivid ethnographic description."—Ireneusz Bialecki, Contemporary Sociology"Its informed skepticism of post-Communist liberal euphoria, its concern for workers, and its fine ethnographic details make this work valuable."—"àkos Róna-Tas, American Journal of Sociology

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Michelangelo studied and wrote poetry throughout his life, and his finest literary efforts are allied with the masterwoks of his visual art, and this translation captures the pathos, complexity, and ardor of both Michelangelo's language and his poetic temperament. The text gives a glimpse into one of the most fascinating minds in the history of art, as Michelangelo laboured in the Sistine Chapel he composed a series of passionate love sonnets and while struggling, near the end of his life, to complete his final "Pieta" he worked at religious poems anguished in their fervour.

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What is the good life for a human being? Aristotle's exploration of this question in the "Nicomachean Ethics" has established it as a founding work of Western philosophy, though its teachings have long puzzled readers and provoked spirited discussion. Adopting a radically new point of view, Ronna Burger deciphers some of the most perplexing conundrums of this influential treatise by approaching it as Aristotle's dialogue with the Platonic Socrates. Tracing the argument of the Ethics as it emerges through that approach, Burger's careful reading shows how Aristotle represents ethical virtue from the perspective of those devoted to it while standing back to examine its assumptions and implications.

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Originally published in 1949 and appearing now for the first time in a paperbound edition, Buck's Dictionary remains an indispensable tool for diachronic analysis of the Indo-European languages. Arranged according to the meaning of words, the work contains more than 1,000 groupings of synonyms from the principal Indo-European languages. Buck first tabulates the words describing a particular concept and then discusses their etymological and semantic history, tracing changes in meaning of the root words as well as presenting cases indicating which of the older forms have been replaced by expressions of colloquial or foreign origin.

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This volume is an attempt to reconstitute the tacit knowledge - the shared, unwritten assumptions, values and understandings - that shapes the work of science. Jed Z. Buchwald uses as his focus the social and intellectual world of 19th-century German physics. Drawing on the lab notes, published papers and unpublished manuscripts of Heinrich Hertz, Buchwald recreates Hertz's 1887 invention of a device that produced electromagnetic waves in wires. The invention itself was serendipitous and the device was quickly transformed, but Hertz's early experiments led to major innovations in electrodynamics. Buchwald explores the difficulty Hertz had in reconciling the theories of other physicists, including Hermann von Helmholtz and James Clerk Maxwell, and he considers the complex and often problematic connections between theory and experiment. In this first detailed scientific biography of Hertz and his scientific community, Buchwald demonstrates that tacit knowledge can be recovered so that we can begin to identify the unspoken rules that govern scientific practice.

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"No one interested in the history of optics, the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physics, or the general phenomenon of theory change in science can afford to ignore Jed Buchwald's well-structured, highly detailed, and scrupulously researched book. . . . Buchwald's analysis will surely constitute the essential starting point for further work on this important and hitherto relatively neglected episode of theory change."—John Worrall, Isis

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Outsider Scientists describes the transformative role played by "outsiders" in the growth of the modern life sciences. Biology, which occupies a special place between the exact and human sciences, has historically attracted many thinkers whose primary training was in other fields: mathematics, physics, chemistry, linguistics, philosophy, history, anthropology, engineering, and even literature. These outsiders brought with them ideas and tools that were foreign to biology, but which, when applied to biological problems, helped to bring about dramatic, and often surprising, breakthroughs. This volume brings together eighteen thought-provoking biographical essays of some of the most remarkable outsiders of the modern era, each written by an authority in the respective field. From Noam Chomsky using linguistics to answer questions about brain architecture, to Erwin Schrodinger contemplating DNA as a physicist would, to Drew Endy tinkering with Biobricks to create new forms of synthetic life, the outsiders featured here make clear just how much there is to gain from disrespecting conventional boundaries. Innovation, it turns out, often relies on importing new ideas from other fields. Without its outsiders, modern biology would hardly be recognizable.

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In May 1965 Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared that 'the Viet Cong has committed the most unbelievable acts of terrorism the world has ever known.' And throughout the long conflict in Vietnam, Americans similarly demonized the enemy fighters as reds, gooks, and fanatical killers. Offering a radically different view of these supposedly savage soldiers, "Mekong Diaries" presents never-before-published drawings, poems, letters, and oral histories by ten of the most celebrated Viet Cong war artists.These guerrilla artists - some military officers and some civilians - lived clandestinely with the fighters, moving camp alongside them, going on reconnaissance missions, and carrying their sketchbooks, inks, and watercolors into combat. Trained by professors from the Hanoi Institute of Fine Arts who journeyed down the perilous Ho Chi Minh Trail to ensure a pictorial history of the war, they recorded battles and events from Operation Junction City to Khe Sanh to the Tet Offensive. They also sketched as the spirit moved them, rendering breathtaking landscapes, hut and bunker interiors, activities at base camps, troops on the move, portraits for the families of fallen soldiers, and the unimaginable devastation that the conflict left in its wake.Their collective record - which Sherry Buchanan skillfully compiles here - is an extraordinary historical and artistic document of people at war. As such, it serves as a powerful response to the self-centeredness of American accounts of Vietnam, filling a profound gap in our national memory by taking us into the misunderstood worlds of those whom we once counted among our worst enemies.

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For too long, argues Richard Harvey Brown, social scientists have felt forced to choose between imitating science's empirical methodology and impersonating a romantic notion of art, the methods of which are seen as primarily a matter of intuition, interpretation, and opinion. Developing the idea of a "cognitive aesthetic," Brown shows how both science and art—as well as the human studies that stand between them—depend on metaphoric thinking as their "logic of discovery" and may be assessed in terms of such aesthetic criteria of adequacy as economy, elegance, originality, scope, congruence, and form. By recognizing this "aesthetic" common ground between science and art, Brown demonstrates that a fusion can be achieved within the human sciences of these two principal ideals of knowledge—the scientific or positivist one and the artistic or intuitive one. A path, then, is opened for creating a knowledge of ourselves and society which is at once objective and subjective, at once valid scientifically and significantly humane.

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This book is an invitation to think about why children chew pencils; why we talk to our cars, our refrigerators, our computers; rosary beads and worry beads; Cuban cigars; why we no longer wear hats that we can tip to one another and why we don't seem to long to; and what has been described as bourgcois longing. It is an invitation to think about the fetishism of daily life in different times and in different cultures. It is an invitation to rethink several topics of critical inquiry - camp, collage, primitivism, consumer culture, muscum culture, the aesthetic object, still life, "things as they are," Renaissance wonders, "the thing itself" - within the rubric of "things," not in an effort to foreclose the question of what sort of things these seem to be, but rather to suggest new questions about how objects produce subjects, about the phenomenology of the material everyday, about the secret life of things. Based on an award-winning special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry, Things features eighteen thought-provoking essays by contributors including Bill Brown, Matthew L. Jones, Bruno Latour, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jessica Riskin, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Peter Schwenger, Charity Scribner, and Alan Trachtenberg.

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Decades after his death, Albert Camus (1913-60) is still regarded as one of the most influential and fascinating intellectuals of the twentieth century. This biography by Stephen Eric Bronner explores the connections between his literary work, his philosophical writings, and his politics. Camus illuminates his impoverished childhood, his existential concerns, his activities in the antifascist resistance, and the controversies in which he was engaged. Beautifully written and incisively argued, this study offers new insights and highlights the contemporary relevance of an extraordinary man.

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In 1899 an American could open a newspaper and find outrageous images, such as an American soldier being injected with leprosy by Filipino insurgents. These kinds of hyperbolic accounts, David Brody argues in this illuminating book, were just one element of the visual and material culture that played an integral role in debates about empire in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. "Visualizing American Empire" explores the ways visual imagery and design shaped the political and cultural landscape. Drawing on a myriad of sources - including photographs, tattoos, the decorative arts, the popular press, maps, parades, and material from world's fairs and urban planners - Brody offers a distinctive perspective on American imperialism. Exploring the period leading up to the Spanish-American War, as well as beyond it, Brody argues that the way Americans visualized the Orient greatly influenced the fantasies of colonial domestication that would play out in the Philippines. Throughout, Brody insightfully examines visual culture's integral role in the machinery that runs the colonial engine. The result is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the United States, art, design, or empire.

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Through critical readings of key works of modern European literature, Victor Brombert shows how a new kind of hero - the antihero - has arisen to replace the toppled heroic model. Though they fail, by design, to live up to conventional expectations of mythic heroes, antiheroes are not necessarily "failures." They display different kinds of courage more in tune with our time and our needs: deficiency translated into strength, failure experienced as honesty, dignity achieved through humiliation. Brombert explores these paradoxes in the works of Buchner, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Svevo, Hasek, Frisch, Camus, and Levi. Coming from diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, these writers all use the figure of the antihero to question handed-down assumptions, to re-examine moral categories, and to raise issues of survival and renewal embodying the spirit of an uneasy age.

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Using a variety of historical sources, Richard H. Brodhead reconstructs the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of post-emancipation black education. He describes how these socially structured worlds of writing shaped the terms of literary practice for writers like Stowe, Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Charles Chesnutt.

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