Search results for ""university of chicago press""

The People Shall Judge provides a complete set of readings for courses in American history and political science and for general social science courses. The editors have assembled more than 250 readings which illustrate the great controversies in America's past, the issues involved in forming American public policy yesterday and today. These selections have been drawn from systematic philosophies; from opinions expressed in law and judicial decisions; from speeches or pamphlets struck off in the heat of controversy; from political and diplomatic correspondence. They are grouped to focus attention on the perennial issues of liberty, equality, and security in about a dozen significant periods of American history. Volume I, Part 1, begins with a consideration of truth and liberty in the seventeenth century, continues with a study of the issues of the American Revolution, and concludes with a study of the Confederation and the Constitution. The organization of the readings puts the issues in the context of four fundamental relationships: the citizen and the economy (and, within the economy, the interrelations of major interest groups); the federal union and the states; the United States and the world. The best available texts have been used. Introductions and explanatory notes relate the readings to one another, suggest the circumstances in which they were written, and provide biographical information about the authors.

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"Black, White and in Colour" offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past 20 years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act - one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project. Spillers is probably best known for her race-centred revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Other essays such as "Who Cuts the Border?" consider the effect of migration on the black cultural experience. "Moving on Down the Line" opens a fascinating window onto the African American sermon. "A Hateful Passion, a Lost Love" contrasts fiction by Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurtston and Margaret Walker. A new preface and introduction that appear here for the first time trace the trajectory of the author's career and point the way toward new lines of inquiry. Ultimately, the essays collected in "Black, White and in Colour" all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature should want to read them.

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In the mid-twentieth century, gay life flourished in American cities even as the state repression of queer communities reached its peak. Liquor investigators infiltrated and shut down gay-friendly bars. Plainclothes decoys enticed men in parks and clubs. Vice officers surveilled public bathrooms through peepholes and two-way mirrors. In Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky chronicles this painful story, tracing the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life from the 1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics often inspired in court. Lvovsky shows that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of live debates about not only the law’s treatment of queer people, but also the limits of ethical policing, the authority of experts, and the nature of sexual difference itself—debates that had often unexpected effects on the gay community’s rights and freedoms. Examining those battles, Vice Patrol enriches understandings of the regulation of queer life in the twentieth century and disputes about police power that continue today.

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Popular conceptions hold that capitalism is driven almost entirely by the pursuit of profit and self-interest. Though this may largely be true, it conflicts with our actual experience of the realities of capitalism - and is belied by the many associations that take an interest not just in their industry but also the people who maintain it. In "Solidarity in Strategy", Lyn Spillman works from extensive documentary archives and a comprehensive data set of more than four thousand trade associations from obscure corners of commercial life. In studying these diverse groups, from the Cotton Textile Institute to the Cracker and Biscuit Association, Spillman reveals an unexpected truth about capitalist society: protecting and promoting the profits of its member businesses are only two of the many functions these associations serve. More collegial than cutthroat, these associations band businesses together to develop strategies to promote their common welfare, and in doing so, they develop group identities and a sense of solidarity. Timely and far-reaching, "Solidarity in Strategy" leads us to question some of our most basic assumptions about economic life and forces us to consider how these communities of workers orient themselves in the intertwined worlds of business and society.

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The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict illuminates the controversial course of America's Middle East relations from the birth of Israel to the Reagan administration. Skillfully separating actual policymaking from the myths that have come to surround it, Spiegel challenges the belief that American policy in the Middle East is primarily a relation to events in that region or is motivated by bureaucratic constraints or the pressures of domestic politics. On the contrary, he finds that the ideas and skills of the president and his advisors are critical to the determination of American policy. This volume received the 1986 National Jewish Book Award.

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A timely and multifaceted portrait of the lawyers who serve the diverse constituencies of the conservative movement, "Lawyers of the Right" explains what unites and divides lawyers for the three major groups - social conservatives, libertarians, and business advocates - that have coalesced in recent decades behind the Republican Party.Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than seventy lawyers who represent conservative and libertarian nonprofit organizations, Ann Southworth explores their values and identities and traces the implications of their shared interest in promoting political strategies that give lawyers leading roles. She goes on to illuminate the function of mediator organizations - such as the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy - that have succeeded in promoting cooperation among different factions of conservative lawyers. Such cooperation, she finds, has aided efforts to drive law and the legal profession politically rightward and to give lawyers greater prominence in the conservative movement. Southworth concludes, though, that tensions between the conservative law movement's elite and populist elements may ultimately lead to its undoing.

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With American leadership facing increased competition from China and India, the question of how hegemons emerge - and are able to create conditions for lasting stability - is of utmost importance in international relations. The generally accepted wisdom is that liberal superpowers, with economies based on capitalist principles, are best able to develop systems conducive to the health of the global economy. In "Birth of Hegemony", Andrew C. Sobel draws attention to the critical role played by finance in the emergence of these liberal hegemons. He argues that a hegemon must have both the capacity and the willingness to bear a disproportionate share of the cost of providing key collective goods that are the basis of international cooperation and exchange. Through this, the hegemon helps maintain stability and limits the risk to productive international interactions. However, prudent planning can account for only part of a hegemon's ability to provide public goods, while some of the necessary conditions must be developed simply through processes of economic growth and political development. Sobel supports these claims by examining the economic trajectories that led to the successive leadership of the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. Stability in international affairs has long been a topic of great interest to our understanding of global politics, and Sobel's account sets the stage for a consideration of recent developments affecting the United States.

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A philosophically and historically sensitive account of the engagement of the major protagonists of Victorian British philosophy, "Reforming Philosophy" considers the controversies between William Whewell and John Stuart Mill on the topics of science, morality, politics, and economics. By situating their debate within the larger context of Victorian society and its concerns, Laura J. Snyder shows how two very different men - Whewell, an educator, Anglican priest, and critic of science; and Mill, a philosopher, political economist, and parliamentarian - reacted to the challenges of their times, each seeking to reform science as a means of reforming society as a whole. The first book-length examination of the dispute between Mill and Whewell in its entirety, "Reforming Philosophy" provides a rich and nuanced understanding of the intellectual spirit of Victorian Britain and will be welcomed by philosophers and historians of science, scholars of Victorian studies, and students of the history of philosophy and political economy.

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From the chain gang to the electric chair, the problem of how to deal with criminals has long been debated. What explains this concern with getting punishment right? And why do attitudes toward particular punishments change radically over time? In addressing these questions, Philip Smith attacks the comfortable myth that punishment is about justice, reason, and law. Instead he argues that punishment is an essentially irrational act founded in ritual as a means to control evil without creating more of it in the process."Punishment and Culture" traces three centuries of the history of punishment, looking in detail at issues ranging from public executions and the development of the prison to Jeremy Bentham's notorious panopticon and the invention of the guillotine. Smith contends that each of these attempts to achieve sterile bureaucratic control was thwarted as uncontrollable cultural forces generated alternative visions of heroic villains, darkly gothic technologies, and sacred awe. Moving from Andy Warhol to eighteenth-century highwaymen to Orwell's 1984, Smith puts forward a dazzling account of the cultural landscape of punishment. His findings will fascinate students of sociology, history, criminology, law, and cultural studies.

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Jainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One important way it has often been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the highly contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, does not contain a tantric path to liberation. But in Making a Mantra, historian of religions Ellen Gough refines and challenges our understanding of Tantra by looking at the development over two millennia of a Jain incantation, or mantra, that evolved from an auspicious invocation in a second-century text into a key component of mendicant initiations and meditations that continue to this day. Typically, Jainism is characterized as a celibate, ascetic path to liberation in which one destroys karma through austerities, while the tantric path to liberation is characterized as embracing the pleasures of the material world, requiring the ritual use of mantras to destroy karma. Gough, however, argues that asceticism and Tantra should not be viewed in opposition to one another. She does so by showing that Jains perform “tantric” rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and maṇḍalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation.

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From the chain gang to the electric chair, the problem of how to deal with criminals has long been debated. What explains this concern with getting punishment right? And why do attitudes toward particular punishments change radically over time? In addressing these questions, Philip Smith attacks the comfortable myth that punishment is about justice, reason, and law. Instead he argues that punishment is an essentially irrational act founded in ritual as a means to control evil without creating more of it in the process."Punishment and Culture" traces three centuries of the history of punishment, looking in detail at issues ranging from public executions and the development of the prison to Jeremy Bentham's notorious panopticon and the invention of the guillotine. Smith contends that each of these attempts to achieve sterile bureaucratic control was thwarted as uncontrollable cultural forces generated alternative visions of heroic villains, darkly gothic technologies, and sacred awe. Moving from Andy Warhol to eighteenth-century highwaymen to Orwell's 1984, Smith puts forward a dazzling account of the cultural landscape of punishment. His findings will fascinate students of sociology, history, criminology, law, and cultural studies.

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What is a person? This fundamental question is a perennial concern of philosophers and theologians. But, Christian Smith argues, it also lies at the center of the social scientist's quest to interpret and explain social life. In this ambitious book, Smith presents a new model for social theory that does justice to the best of our humanistic visions of people, life, and society. Finding much current thinking on personhood to be confusing or misleading, Smith finds inspiration in critical realism and personalism. Drawing on these ideas, he constructs a theory of personhood that forges a middle path between the extremes of positivist science and relativism. Smith then builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and William Sewell to demonstrate the importance of personhood to our understanding of social structures. From there he broadens his scope to consider how we can know what is good in personal and social life and what sociology can tell us about human rights and dignity. Innovative, critical, and constructive, "What Is a Person?" offers an inspiring vision of a social science committed to pursuing causal explanations, interpretive understanding, and general knowledge in the service of truth and the moral good.

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Walter Benjamin (1896-1940) has been called by Hannah Arendt the "greatest critic of the century." While an increasing number of Anglo-American literary critics draw upon Benjamin's writings in their own works, their colleagues in the philosophical community remain relatively unacquainted with his legacy. In the European intellectual world, by contrast, Benjamin's critical epistemological program, his philosophies of history and language, and his aesthetics have long since become part of philosophical discourse. The present collection of articles, many of which were contained in earlier versions in the Winter 1983 special issue of the journal The Philosophical Forum, initiates the project of establishing Benjamin's importance to philosophy. A balance of original work by Benjamin and important commentary on his works, this volume includes the crucial chapter from Benjamin's magnum opus The Arcades Project, his "Program of the Coming Philosophy," and "Central Park," as well as essays by leading scholars (including Theodor W. Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, and Rolf Tiedemann) that treat single philosophical themes and relate his ideas to those of other thinkers such as Gadamer, Goodmann, and Rosenzweig. Gary Smith's introduction to the volume provides an extremely useful and sophisticated entrée for readers unaccustomed to the breadth of Benjamin's philosophical allusions, as well as an informative summation of the contents of the volume. This book will be of interest to philosophers, literary theorists, art historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists.

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Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its “milieu,” “atmosphere,” or “environment.” Christian explores how the artwork’s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and that Cezanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited. Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.

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The Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, and the making and unmaking of the model town of Pullman - these remarkable events in what many considered the quintessential American city forced people across the country to confront the disorder that seemed inevitably to accompany urban growth and social change. In "Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief", Carl Smith explores the imaginative dimensions of these events as he traces the evolution of interconnected beliefs and actions that increasingly linked city, disorder, and social reality in the minds of Americans. Examining a remarkable range of writings and illustrations, as well as protests, public gatherings, trials, hearings, and urban reform and construction efforts, Smith argues that these three events - and the public awareness of them - not only informed one another, but collectively shaped how Americans understood, and continue to understand, Chicago and modern urban life. This classic of urban cultural history is updated with a foreword by the author that expands our understanding of urban disorder to encompass such recent examples as Hurricane Katrina, the Oklahoma City bombing, and 9/11.

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One of the most influential theorists of religion, Jonathan Z. Smith is best known for his analyses of religious studies as a discipline and for his advocacy and refinement of comparison as the basis for the history of religions. Relating Religion gathers seventeen essays—four of them never before published—that together provide the first broad overview of Smith's thinking since his seminal 1982 book, Imagining Religion.Smith first explains how he was drawn to the study of religion, outlines his own theoretical commitments, and draws the connections between his thinking and his concerns for general education. He then engages several figures and traditions that serve to define his interests within the larger setting of the discipline. The essays that follow consider the role of taxonomy and classification in the study of religion, the construction of difference, and the procedures of generalization and redescription that Smith takes to be key to the comparative enterprise. The final essays deploy features of Smith's most recent work, especially the notion of translation.Heady, original, and provocative, Relating Religion is certain to be hailed as a landmark in the academic study and critical theory of religion.

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Guitars inspire cult-like devotion: an aficionado can tell you precisely when and where their favorite instrument was made, the wood it is made from, and that wood’s unique effect on the instrument’s sound. In The Guitar, Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren follow that fascination around the globe as they trace guitars all the way back to the tree. The authors take us to guitar factories, port cities, log booms, remote sawmills, Indigenous lands, and distant rainforests, on a quest for behind-the-scenes stories and insights into how guitars are made, where the much-cherished guitar timbers ultimately come from, and the people and skills that craft those timbers along the way. Gibson and Warren interview hundreds of people to give us a first-hand account of the ins and outs of production methods, timber milling, and forest custodianship in diverse corners of the world, including the Pacific Northwest, Madagascar, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Japan, China, Hawaii, and Australia. They unlock surprising insights into longer arcs of world history: on the human exploitation of nature, colonialism, industrial capitalism, cultural tensions, and seismic upheavals. But the authors also strike a hopeful note, offering a parable of wider resonance—of the incredible but underappreciated skill and care that goes into growing forests and felling trees, milling timber, and making enchanting musical instruments, set against the human tendency to reform our use (and abuse) of natural resources only when it may be too late. The Guitar promises to resonate with anyone who has ever fallen in love with a guitar.

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In this ambitious book, Terry Smith chronicles the modernist revolution in American art and design between the world wars—from its origins in the new industrial age of mass production, automation, and corporate culture to its powerful and transforming effects on the way Americans came to see themselves and their world. From Ford Motor's first assembly line in 1913 to the New York World's Fair of 1939, Smith traces the evolution of visual imagery in the first half of America's century of progress.

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Explorers of the Amazon vividly describes how European explorers such as Pedro Cabral, Francisco De Orellana, Lope de Aguirre, and Madame Godin encountered the vast wilderness of the Amazon basin; how they searched, exploited, and fought over its riches; and what they learned and failed to learn through four centuries of adventure. Anthony Smith not only enriches this history with fascinating geographical, political, and scientific details but also gives a strong warning to those who continue to exploit this great river's resources. "The history of Amazonian exploration, wonderfully told by Anthony Smith, is awash with madness—an extravagant mixture of the malevolent and the miraculous."—Stephen Mills, Times Literary Supplement

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For decades now, scholars and politicians alike have argued that the concentration of poverty in city housing projects would produce distrust, alienation, apathy, and social isolation - the disappearance of what sociologists call social capital. But relatively few have examined precisely how such poverty affects social capital or have considered for what reasons living in a poor neighborhood results in such undesirable effects. This book examines a neglected Puerto Rican enclave in Boston to consider the pros and cons of social scientific thinking about the true nature of ghettos in America. Mario Luis Small dismantles the theory that poor urban neighborhoods are inevitably deprived of social capital. He shows that the conditions specified in this theory are vaguely defined and variable among poor communities. According to Small, structural conditions such as unemployment or a failed system of familial relations must be acknowledged as affecting the urban poor, but individual motivations and the importance of timing must be considered as well. Brimming with fresh theoretical insights, Villa Victoria is an elegant work of sociology that will be essential to students of urban poverty.

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From the fundamental rights proclaimed in the American and French declarations of independence to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Hannah Arendt's furious critiques, the definition of what it means to be human has been hotly debated. But the history of human rights - and their abuses - is also a richly illustrated one. Following this picture trail, "Human Rights In Camera" takes an innovative approach by examining the visual images that have accompanied human rights struggles and the passionate responses people have had to them. Sharon Sliwinski considers a series of historical events, including the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Holocaust, to illustrate that universal human rights have come to be imagined through aesthetic experience. The circulation of images of distant events, she argues, forms a virtual community between spectators and generates a sense of shared humanity. Joining a growing body of scholarship about the cultural forces at work in the construction of human rights, "Human Rights In Camera" is a novel take on this potent political ideal.

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In folktales told throughout much of the Brazilian Amazon, dolphins take human form, attend raucous dances and festivals, seduce men and women, and carry them away to a city beneath the river. They are encantados, or Enchanted Beings, capable of provoking death or madness, but also called upon to help shamanic healers. Male dolphins - accomplished dancers who appear dressed in dapper straw hats, white suits and with shiny black shoes - reportedly father numerous children. The females are said to lure away solitary fishermen. Both sinister and charming, these characters resist definition and thus domination; greedy and lascivious outsiders, they are increasingly symbolic of a distinctly Amazonian culture politically, socially, economically and environmentally under seige. Candace Slater examines these stories in this book, both as folk narratives and as representations of culture and conflict in Amazonia. Her study discusses the tales from the viewpoints of genre, performance and gender, but centres on them as responses to the great changes sweeping the Amazon today. According to Slater, these surprisingly widespread tales reflect Amazonians' own mixed reactions to the ongoing destruction of the rainforest and the resulting transformations in the social as well as physical landscape. Offering an informed view of Brazilian culture, this book crosses the boundaries of folklore, literature, anthropology and Latin American studies.

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The Mexican War has long been overshadowed in the public imagination by that most popular of all American wars, the Civil War. And it has been swept under the carpet of national conscience as, at worst, a calculated land grab from a neighbor too weak to defend itself. Otis Singletary's concise, dramatic account of the war that won the Southwest and California for the United States is designed to evoke in modern readers a fresh appreciation of one of the most colorful but neglected episodes in American military affairs—and certainly one of the most significant. Victory in this "military exercise" turned our attention to the Far West, made possible the Gold Rush of '49, and brought vast new territories and new peoples into the Union—altering the face of the nation and greatly influencing its future course. Mr. Singletary treats the military, political, economic, and diplomatic aspects of the war. He focuses on the ways in which the Mexican War exemplified the dynamic spirit of Manifest Destiny and was a microcosm of peculiarly American—and peculiarly democratic—problems of waging war. "All in all, this is the best short account of the Mexican War yet written."—T. Harry Williams, The Journal of Modern History

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When Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, no one cut off his head, boiled away its flesh, and added his grinning skull to a collection of crania. It would have been strange, but perhaps fitting, had Morton’s skull wound up in a collector’s cabinet, for Morton himself had collected hundreds of skulls over the course of a long career. Friends, diplomats, doctors, soldiers, and fellow naturalists sent him skulls they gathered from battlefields and burial grounds across America and around the world.With The Skull Collectors, eminent historian Ann Fabian resurrects that popular and scientific movement, telling the strange—and at times gruesome—story of Morton, his contemporaries, and their search for a scientific foundation for racial difference. From cranial measurements and museum shelves to heads on stakes, bloody battlefields, and the “rascally pleasure” of grave robbing, Fabian paints a lively picture of scientific inquiry in service of an agenda of racial superiority, and of a society coming to grips with both the deadly implications of manifest destiny and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. Even as she vividly recreates the past, Fabian also deftly traces the continuing implications of this history, from lingering traces of scientific racism to debates over the return of the remains of Native Americans that are held by museums to this day.Full of anecdotes, oddities, and insights, The Skull Collectors takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip down a little-visited but surprisingly important byway of American history.

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We have only recently started to challenge the notion that "serious" inquiry can be free of rhetoric, that it can rely exclusively on "hard" fact and "cold" logic in support of its claims. Increasingly, scholars are shifting their attention from methods of proof to the heuristic methods of debate and discussion—the art of rhetoric—to examine how scholarly discourse is shaped by tropes and figures, by the naming and framing of issues, and by the need to adapt arguments to ends, audiences, and circumstances. Herbert W. Simons and the contributors to this important collection of essays provide impressive evidence that the new movement referred to as the rhetorical turn offers a rigorous way to look within and across the disciplines. The Rhetorical Turn moves from biology to politics via excursions into the rhetorics of psychoanalysis, decision science, and conversational analysis. Topics explored include how rhetorical invention guides scientific invention, how rhetoric assists political judgment, and how it integrates varying approaches to meta-theory. Concluding with four philosophical essays, this volume of case studies demonstrates how the inventive and persuasive dimensions of scholarly discourse point the way to forms of argument appropriate to our postmodern age.

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Over the past thirty years, the world’s patent systems have experienced pressure from civil society like never before. From farmers to patient advocates, new voices are arguing that patents impact public health, economic inequality, morality—and democracy. These challenges, to domains that we usually consider technical and legal, may seem surprising. But in Patent Politics, Shobita Parthasarathy argues that patent systems have always been deeply political and social. To demonstrate this, Parthasarathy takes readers through a particularly fierce and prolonged set of controversies over patents on life forms linked to important advances in biology and agriculture and potentially life-saving medicines. Comparing battles over patents on animals, human embryonic stem cells, human genes, and plants in the United States and Europe, she shows how political culture, ideology, and history shape patent system politics. Clashes over whose voices and which values matter in the patent system, as well as what counts as knowledge and whose expertise is important, look quite different in these two places. And through these debates, the United States and Europe are developing very different approaches to patent and innovation governance. Not just the first comprehensive look at the controversies swirling around biotechnology patents, Patent Politics is also the first in-depth analysis of the political underpinnings and implications of modern patent systems, and provides a timely analysis of how we can reform these systems around the world to maximize the public interest.

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Everything that lives will die. That's the fundamental fact of life. But not everyone dies at the same age: people vary wildly in their patterns of aging and their life spans - and that variation is nothing compared to what's found in other animal and plant species. A giant fungus found in Michigan has been alive since the Ice Age, while a dragonfly lives but four months, a mayfly half an hour. What accounts for these variations - and what can we learn from them that might help us understand, or better manage, our own aging? With The Long and the Short of It, biologist and writer Jonathan Silvertown offers readers a fascinating tour through the scientific study of longevity and aging. Dividing his daunting subject by theme - death, life span, aging, heredity, evolution, and more - Silvertown draws on the latest scientific developments to paint a picture of what we know about how life span, senescence, and death vary within and across species. At every turn, he addresses fascinating questions that have far-reaching implications: What causes aging, and what determines the length of an individual life? What changes have caused the average human life span to increase so dramatically - fifteen minutes per hour - in the past two centuries? If evolution favors those who leave the most descendants, why haven't we evolved to be immortal? The answers to these puzzles and more emerge from close examination of the whole natural history of life span and aging, from fruit flies to nematodes, redwoods, and much more. The Long and the Short of It pairs a perpetually fascinating topic with a wholly engaging writer, and the result is a book that will reward curious readers of all ages.

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Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and other analysts of culture. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this collection of ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it. Eleven original essays of "natural history" range in focus from nuptial poetry of insult to case-based teaching methods in first-year law-school classrooms. Stage by stage, they give an idea of the cultural processes of "entextualization" and "contextualization" of discourse that they illustrate.

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Love in a Dead Language is a love story, a translation of an Indian sex manual, an erotic farce, and a murder mystery. The hero of this protean comedy, Leopold Roth, complains, "I am a tenured full professor of Indian studies and a Sanskrit scholar, and yet never, never in my life, have I made love to an Indian woman." Imagining that such an intimacy would provide a deeper and truer understanding of what he has spent his academic life mastering, a happily married Roth becomes obsessed with Lalita Gupta, nubile student and avatar of his fantasies of a sexually idyllic ancient realm. Although this California-born Indian girl has no interest in India, the past, or him, Roth sets out to seduce her and, at the same time, to teach her who she is in terms of the history of Indian culture. To that end he begins to translate the Kamasutra for her, interspersing that translation with a confessional commentary. By inventing a bogus summer study abroad program, the professor is able to abduct Lalita to the land of her ancestors. After an emotionally tumultuous summer, Roth returns home only to be suspended from teaching, left by his wife, and beaten to death with a Sanskrit dictionary. Roth's murder leaves the completion of his translation to graduate student Anang Saighal. The voices of Saighal, Roth, Professor Lee Siegel, Vatsyayana, author of the Kamasutra, with a chorus of other victims and celebrants of sexual desire, constitute an outrageous operatic portrayal of romantic love. Love in a Dead Language exposes the complicities between the carnal and the intellectual, the erotic and the exotic, the false and the true. It is as raunchy as it is erudite, as hilarious as it is poignant, and as entertaining as it is profound.

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When Lee Siegel went to India to do research for a book on Sanskrit horror literature, a friend in New Delhi told him about an itinerant teller of ghost and vampire tales, a man with clusters of amulets around his neck and a silk top hat with peacock plumes on his head. Siegel set out in search of the old man—called Brahm Kathuwala—to hear his stories and to learn about his uncommon life. But what started out as a study of other people's stories became a compelling story itself. City of Dreadful Night is an astonishing work of fiction, a tangle of tales that transports the reader from the Medieval India of magicians, witches, and vampires, through the British India of Brahm Kathuwala's childhood, into the chaos and political terror of contemporary India. Vividly recreating Indian literary and oral traditions, Siegel weaves a web of possession, reincarnation, and magical transformation unlike any found in the Western tradition. Flesh-eating demons, Rajiv Gandhi's assassin, even Bram Stoker and Dracula populate the serpentine narrative, which intermingles stories about the characters with the terrifying tales they tell.Siegel pursues Brahm Kathuwala from the ghastly lights of the cremation ground at Banaras through villages all over north India. Brahm's life story is revealed through countless tales along the way. We learn that he was raised, and abandoned, by two mothers—one the destitute floor sweeper who bore him; the other her employer, a wealthy Irish woman who read and reread to him the story of Dracula. We hear of his marriage to the daughter of a cremation ground attendant, his battles against her demonic possession, and their painful parting. We come to understand the daily life and motivations of this "horror professional," who uses terrifying tales to ward off the evil he himself fears.This unorthodox book is more than a story; it blends scholarship, fantasy, travelogue, and autobiography—fusing and overlapping historical accounts and newscasts, literary texts and films, dreams and nocturnal tales. Siegel uses imagination to explore the relation of real terror to horror fiction and to contemplate the ways fear and disgust become thrilling elements in stories of the macabre. This book is the product of Siegel's deep knowledge of both Indian and Western literary and philosophical traditions. It is also an attempt to come to grips with the omnipresence of political and religious terror in contemporary India. Shocking, original, beautifully written, City of Dreadful Night offers readers a captivating immersion in the wonder and terror of India, past and present.

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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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Drawing from their experience as government insiders, George P. Shultz and Kenneth W. Dam show how economic policy is shaped at the highest levels of government. They reveal the interconnections between economic, social, and international policy, covering issues such as the advocacy system and the role of the individual in shaping policy. A new chapter, 'A Changed World,' explores the various influences of our increasingly global economy on economic strategy. With rare candor, authority and breadth of vision, Shultz and Dam have produced a brilliant introduction to economic policy, its principles, and practice. "A model of brevity and lucidity ...[Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines] incorporates a unique and rewarding blend of economic reasoning with a high level of political awareness ...enriched by the wide personal experience in government of the authors."--Albert T. Sommers, Across the Board "[Shultz and Dam] help foreign readers to understand why the world looks so different from Washington...This book should provide the model."--The Economist "A wise and valuable book showing great insight into the realities of economic policy making."--Henry A. Kissinger

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In this unique book on education, Shor develops teaching theory side-by-side with a political analysis of schooling. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, he offers the first practical and theoretical guide to Freirean methods for American classrooms. Central to his method is a commitment to learning through dialogue and to exploring themes from everyday life. He poses alienation and mass culture as key obstacles to learning, and establishes critical literacy as a foundation for studying any subject.

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Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) is best known as a media theorist—many consider him the founder of media studies—but he was also an important theorist of art. Though a near-household name for decades due to magazine interviews and TV specials, McLuhan remains an underappreciated yet fascinating figure in art history. His connections with the art of his own time were largely unexplored, until now. In Distant Early Warning, art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more surprisingly, that McLuhan’s work directly influenced the art and artists of his time. Kitnick builds the story of McLuhan’s entanglement with artists by carefully drawing out the connections among McLuhan, his theories, and the artists themselves. The story is packed with big names: Marcel Duchamp, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and others. Kitnick masterfully weaves this history with McLuhan’s own words and his provocative ideas about what art is and what artists should do, revealing McLuhan’s influence on the avant-garde through the confluence of art and theory. The illuminating result sheds light on new aspects of McLuhan, showing him not just as a theorist, or an influencer, but as a richly multifaceted figure who, among his many other accolades, affected multiple generations of artists and their works. The book finishes with Kitnick overlaying McLuhan’s ethos onto the state of contemporary and post-internet art. This final channeling of McLuhan is a swift and beautiful analysis, with a personal touch, of art’s recent transgressions and what its future may hold.

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"Tradition", by esteemed sociologist Edward Shils, was the first book to fully explore the history, significance, and future of tradition as a whole. Intent on questioning the meaning of the antitraditionalist impulse in today's society, Shils argues here that the tendency to distrust and rebel against tradition is at the heart of tradition itself; only through suspicion and defiance does tradition actually move forward. Revealing the importance of tradition to social and political institutions, technology, science, literature, religion, and scholarship, "Tradition" remains the definitive work on this vital element of our society.

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This work takes a look at the human impact of World War I by examining the ways in which the French remembered their veterans and war dead after the armistice. Arguing that memory is more than just a record of experience, this cultural history offers a perspective on how commemoration of World War I helped to shape post-war French society and politics. Daniel Sherman shows how a wartime visual culture saturated with images of ordinary foot soldiers, together with contemporary novels, memoirs and tourist literature, promoted a distinctive notion of combat experience. The contrast between battlefield and home front, soldier and civilian was the basis for memory and collective gratitude. Post-war commemoration, however, also grew directly out of the search for the remains of hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers, and the sometimes contentious debates over where to bury them. For this reason, the local monument, with its inscribed list of names and its functional resemblance to tombstobes, emerged as the focal point of commemorative practice. Sherman traces every step in the process of monument building as he analyzes commemoration's competing goals - to pay tribute to the dead, to console the bereaved and to incorporate mourner's individual memories into a larger political discourse.

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A revolution in clock technology in England during the 1660s allowed people to measure time more accurately, attend to it more minutely, and possess it more privately than previously imaginable. In this text, Stuart Sherman argues that innovations in prose emerged simultaneously with this technological breakthrough, enabling authors to recount the new kind of time by which England was learning to live and work. Through readings of Samuel Pepys's diary, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's daily "Spectator", the travel writings of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell and the novels of Daniel Defoe and Frances Burney, Sherman traces the development of a new way of counting time in prose - the diurnal structure of consecutively dated installments - within the cultural context of the daily institutions that gave it form and motion.

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The Social Security Act of 1935 must be counted among the most monumental pieces of legislation ever passed by Congress. Sixty-five years after its enactment, public support for Social Security remains extremely strong. At the same time, there have been reports that Social Security is in grave danger of financial collapse, and numerous groups across the political spectrum have agitated for its reform. The president has put forward proposals to rescue Social Security, conservatives argue for its privatization, and liberals advocate increases in its funding from surplus tax revenues. But what is the average person to make of all this? How many Americans know where the money for Social Security benefits really comes from, or who wins and loses from the system's overall operations? Few people understand the current Social Security system in even its broadest outlines. And yet Social Security reform is ranked among the most important social issues of our time. With this text, Daniel Shaviro makes a contribution to the public understanding of the issues involved in reforming Social Security. His book describes the system and the pressures that have been brought to bear upon it, before dissecting and evaluating the various reform proposals.

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Who are scientists? What kind of people are they? What capacities and virtues are thought to stand behind their considerable authority? "The Scientific Life" is historian Steven Shapin's story about who scientists are, who we think they are, and why our sensibilities about such things matter. From the early twentieth-century origins of corporate research laboratories to the high-flying scientific entrepreneurship of the present, Shapin argues that the radical uncertainties of much contemporary science have made personal virtues more central to its practice than ever before, and he also reveals how radically novel aspects of late modern science have unexpectedly deep historical roots. His elegantly conceived history of the scientific career and character ultimately encourages us to reconsider the very nature of the technical and moral worlds in which we now live.

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In this, his first book, Alan Shapiro vividly recreates some of the more memorable and poignant moments from his Jewish-American childhood, and in the process reveals his compassionate interest in the forgotten, the alienated, and the infirm. The Courtesy is an intelligent, reflective examination of the poet's own psychological history. "The Courtesy is really an admirable book: it shows up the unreality of a lot of the other poetry one reads, dealing honestly and with that perversity which is a sign of thoughfulness, with the slight but heavy matter of our everyday defeats."--Michael Hoffman, Poetry Nation Review

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What distinguishes humans from nonhumans? Two common answers—free will and religion—are in some ways fundamentally opposed. Whereas free will enjoys a central place in our ideas of spontaneity, authorship, and deliberation, religious practices seem to involve a suspension of or relief from the exercise of our will. What, then, is agency, and why has it occupied such a central place in theories of the human?Automatic Religion explores an unlikely series of episodes from the end of the nineteenth century, when crucial ideas related to automatism and, in a different realm, the study of religion were both being born. Paul Christopher Johnson draws on years of archival and ethnographic research in Brazil and France to explore the crucial boundaries being drawn at the time between humans, “nearhumans,” and automata. As agency came to take on a more central place in the philosophical, moral, and legal traditions of the West, certain classes of people were excluded as less-than-human. Tracking the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic, Johnson tests those boundaries, revealing how they were constructed on largely gendered and racial foundations. In the process, he reanimates one of the most mysterious and yet foundational questions in trans-Atlantic thought: what is agency?

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You know the scene: amateur soccer players battling over the ball, spectators cheering from the sidelines, vendors selling their wares from carts. Over the past half century, immigration from Latin America has transformed the public landscape in the United States, and numerous communities are witnessing one of the hallmarks of this transformation: the emergence of park soccer. In Fútbol in the Park, David Trouille takes us into the world of Latino soccer players who regularly play in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood where they are not always welcome. Together on the soccer field, sharing beers after the games, and occasionally exchanging taunts or blows, the men build relationships and a sense of who they are. Through these engrossing, revealing, and at times immortalizing activities, they forge new identities, friendships, and job opportunities, giving themselves a renewed sense of self-worth and community. As the United States becomes increasingly polarized over issues of immigration and culture, Fútbol in the Park offers a close look at the individual lives and experiences of migrants.

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In the decades following World War II, cities across the United States saw an influx of African American families into otherwise homogeneously white areas. This racial transformation of urban neighborhoods led many whites to migrate to the suburbs, producing the phenomenon commonly known as white flight. In Block by Block, Amanda I. Seligman draws on the surprisingly understudied West Side communities of Chicago to shed new light on this story of postwar urban America. Seligman's study reveals that the responses of white West Siders to racial changes occurring in their neighborhoods were both multifaceted and extensive. She shows that, despite rehabilitation efforts, deterioration in these areas began long before the color of their inhabitants changed from white to black. And ultimately, the riots that erupted on Chicago's West Side and across the country in the mid-1960s stemmed not only from the tribulations specific to blacks in urban centers but also from the legacy of accumulated neglect after decades of white occupancy. Seligman's careful and evenhanded account will be essential to understanding that the "flight" of whites to the suburbs was the eventual result of a series of responses to transformations in Chicago's physical and social landscape, occurring one block at a time.

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Though many pioneering feminists were deeply influenced by American pragmatism, their contemporary followers have generally ignored that tradition because of its marginalization by a philosophical mainstream intent on neutral analyses devoid of subjectivity. In this revealing work, Charlene Haddock Seigfried effectively reunites two major social and philosophical movements, arguing that pragmatism, because of its focus on the emancipatory potential of everyday experiences, offers feminism its most viable and powerful philosophical foundation. With careful attention to their interwoven histories and contemporary concerns, Pragmatism and Feminism effectively invigorates both traditions, opening them to new interpretations and appropriations and asserting their timely philosophical relevance. This foundational work in feminist theory simultaneously invites and guides future scholarship in an area of rapidly emerging significance.

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Most of the time, we believe our daily lives to be governed by structures determined from above: laws that dictate our behavior, companies that pay our wages, even climate patterns that determine what we eat or where we live. In contrast, social organization is often a feature of local organization. While those forces may seem beyond individual grasp, we often come together in small communities to change circumstances that would otherwise flatten us. Challenging traditional sociological models of powerful forces, in The Hinge, Gary Alan Fine emphasizes and describes those meso-level collectives, the organizations that bridge our individual interests and the larger structures that shape our lives. Focusing on “tiny publics,” he describes meso-level social collectives as “hinges”: groups that come together to pursue a shared social goal, bridging the individual and the broader society. Understanding these hinges, Fine argues, is crucial to explaining how societies function, creating links between the micro- and macro-orders of society. He draws on historical cases and fieldwork to illustrate how these hinges work and how to describe them. In The Hinge, Fine has given us powerful new theoretical tools for understanding an essential part of our social worlds.

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Are Americans less prejudiced now than they were in the 1970s, or has racism simply gone "underground"? Is racism something that is learned as children, or is it a result of certain social groups striving to maintain their privileged positions in society? In this text, political scientists, sociologists and psychologists explore the late-1990s debate surrounding the sources of racism in America. The essays represent three major approaches to the topic. The social psychological approach maintains that prejudice socialized early in life feeds racial stereotypes, while the social structural viewpoint argues that behaviour is shaped by whites' fear of losing their privileged status. The third perspective looks to non-racially inspired ideology, including attitudes about the size and role of government, as the reason for opposition to policies such as affirmative action. This collection provides a state-of-the-field assessment of the issues and findings on the role of racism in mass politics and public opinion.

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Through an economic assessment of the business of professional sports and prospects for the future in the United States, this study examines factors that determine players' salaries, management practices and franchise values, and long- and short-term corporate ownership. It shows, for example, that while economic growth since 1975 was fueled primarily by sales of television rights, the broadcast market has become saturated and teams will have to look elsewhere for income in the 1990s. This book offers technical insights that should interest business economists and professionals in sports management.

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With fresh insight and contemporary relevance, Radium of the Word argues that a study of the form of language yields meanings otherwise inaccessible through ordinary reading strategies. Attending to the forms of words rather than to their denotations, Craig Dworkin traces hidden networks across the surface of texts, examining how typography, and even individual letters and marks of punctuation, can reveal patterns that are significant without being symbolic—fully meaningful without communicating any preordained message.Radium of the Word takes its title from Mina Loy’s poem for Gertrude Stein, which hails her as the Madame “Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary.” In this spirit, Dworkin considers prose as a dynamic literary form, characterized by experimentation. Dworkin draws on examples from writers as diverse as Lyn Hejinian, William Faulkner, and Joseph Roth. He takes up the status of the proper name in Modernism, with examples from Stein, Loy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and he offers in-depth analyses of individual authors from the counter-canon of the avant-garde, including P. Inman, Russell Atkins, N. H. Pritchard, and Andy Warhol. The result is an inspiring intervention in contemporary poetics.

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