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

Over the centuries, Jewish and Muslim writers transformed the biblical Queen of Sheba from a clever, politically astute sovereign to a demonic force threatening the boundaries of gender. In this book, Jacob Lassner shows how successive retellings of the biblical story reveal anxieties about gender and illuminate the processes of cultural transmission. The Bible presents the Queen of Sheba's encounter with King Solomon as a diplomatic mission: the queen comes "to test him with hard questions," all of which he answers to her satisfaction; she then praises him and, after an exchange of gifts, returns to her own land. By the Middle Ages, Lassner demonstrates, the focus of the queen's visit had shifted from international to sexual politics. The queen was now portrayed as defying nature's equilibrium and God's design. In these retellings, the authors humbled the queen and thereby restored the world to its proper condition. Lassner also examines the Islamization of Jewish themes, using the dramatic accounts of the Queen of Sheba as a test case of how Jewish lore penetrated the literary imagination of Muslims.

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Between Copernicus and Galileo is the story of Christoph Clavius, the Jesuit astronomer and teacher whose work helped set the standards by which Galileo's famous claims appeared so radical, and whose teachings guided the intellectual and scientific agenda of the Church in the central years of the Scientific Revolution. Though relatively unknown today, Clavius was enormously influential throughout Europe in the late 16th and early 17th centuries through his astronomy books - the standard texts used in many colleges and universities, and the tools with which Descartes, Gassendi and Mersenne, among many others, learned their astronomy. James Lattis uses Clavius's own publications, as well as archival materials, to trace the central role Clavius played in integrating traditional Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian natural philosophy into an orthodox cosmology. Although Clavius strongly resisted the new cosmologies of Copernicus and Tycho, Galileo's invention of the telescope ultimately eroded the Ptolemaic world view. By tracing Clavius's views from medieval cosmology to the 17th century, Lattis illuminates the conceptual shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy and the social, intellectual and theological impact of the Scientific Revolution.

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First published in 1930, this classic study of personality types remains vital for the understanding of contemporary public figures. Lasswell's pioneering application of the concepts of clinical psychology to the understanding of powerbrokers in politics, business, and even the church offers insights into the careers of leaders as diverse as Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon.

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The last traces of Australia's tropical rainforest, where the southeasterly winds bring rain to the coastal mountains, contain a unique assemblage of plants and animals, some primitive, many that are found nowhere else on earth. And fifteen years ago, they also contained Bill Laurance, a budding ecologist seduced by the nature of the landscape in north Queensland. Laurance isn't your typical scientist: he wears cut-offs instead of white coats, enjoys the occasional food fight, and isn't afraid to speak his mind, even if it gets him into trouble, as it often did in the Australian rainforest and as he recounts in his marvelous Queensland journal Stinging Trees and Wait-a-Whiles.The book is his record of the time he spent in this remote area and his run-ins with plant, animal, and human species alike. Laurance lived in a tiny town of loggers and farmers, and he witnessed firsthand the impact of conservation issues on individual lives. He found himself at the center of a bitter battle over conservation strategies and became not only the subject of small-town gossip but also the object of many residents' hatred. Keeping ahead of his high-spirited young volunteers, hounded by the drug-sniffing local policeman, and all the while trying to further his own research amid natural and unnatural obstacles, Laurance offers us a personal and hilarious account of fieldwork and life in the Australian outpost of Millaa Millaa. Stinging Trees and Wait-a-Whiles is a biology lesson, a conservation primer, and an utterly energetic story about an impressionable young man who wound up at the epicenter of an issue that tore a small town apart.

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From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. In Consuming Youth, Rob Latham explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a metaphor for the objectification of physical labor in the factory, Latham shows how contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of empowerment and exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system. While the vampire is a voracious consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its own flesh. Powerful fusions of technology and desire, these paired images symbolize the forms of labor and leisure that American society has staked out for contemporary youth. A startling look at youth in our time, Consuming Youth will interest anyone concerned with film, television, and popular culture.

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While the Haitian musical tradition is probably best known for the Vodou-inspired roots music that helped topple the two-generation Duvalier dictatorship, the nation's troubled history of civil unrest and its tangled relationship with the United States is more intensely experienced through its art music, which combines French and German elements of classical music with Haiti's indigenous folk music. "Vodou Nation" examines art music by Haitian and African American composers who were inspired by Haiti's history as a nation created by slave revolt. Around the time of the United State's occupation of Haiti in 1915, African American composers began to incorporate Vodou-inspired musical idioms to showcase black artistry and protest white oppression. Together with Haitian musicians, these composers helped create what Michael Largey calls the "Vodou Nation," an ideal vision of Haiti that championed its African-based culture as a bulwark against America's imperialism. Highlighting the contributions of many Haitian and African American composers who wrote music that brought rhythms and melodies of the Vodou ceremony to local and international audiences, "Vodou Nation" sheds light on a black cosmopolitan musical tradition that was deeply rooted in Haitian culture and politics.

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Despite its rough-and-tumble image, Chicago has long been identified as a city where books take center stage. In fact, a volume by A. J. Liebling gave the Second City its nickname. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle arose from the midwestern capital's most infamous industry. The great Chicago Fire led to the founding of the Chicago Public Library. The city has fostered writers such as Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago's literary magazines The Little Review and Poetry introduced the world to Eliot, Hemingway, Joyce, and Pound. The city's robust commercial printing industry supported a flourishing culture of the book. With this beautifully produced collection, Chicago's rich literary tradition finally gets its due. Chicago by the Book profiles 101 landmark publications about Chicago from the past 170 years that have helped define the city and its image. Each title-carefully selected by the Caxton Club, a venerable Chicago bibliophilic organization-is the focus of an illustrated essay by a leading scholar, writer, or bibliophile. Arranged chronologically to show the history of both the city and its books, the essays can be read in order from Mrs. John H. Kinzie's 1844 Narrative of the Massacre of Chicago to Sara Paretsky's 2015 crime novel Brush Back. Or one can dip in and out, savoring reflections on the arts, sports, crime, race relations, urban planning, politics, and even Mrs. O'Leary's legendary cow. The selections do not shy from the underside of the city, recognizing that its grit and graft have as much a place in the written imagination as soaring odes and boosterism. As Neil Harris observes in his introduction, "Even when Chicagoans celebrate their hearth and home, they do so while acknowledging deep-seated flaws." At the same time, this collection heartily reminds us all of what makes Chicago, as Norman Mailer called it, the "great American city." With essays from, among others, Ira Berkow, Thomas Dyja, Ann Durkin Keating, Alex Kotlowitz, Toni Preckwinkle, Frank Rich, Don Share, Carl Smith, Regina Taylor, Garry Wills, and William Julius Wilson; and featuring works by Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Clarence Darrow, Erik Larson, David Mamet, Studs Terkel, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many more.

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Since the late 1950s, the engineering job market in the United States has been fraught with fears of a shortage of engineering skill and talent. U.S. Engineering in a Global Economy brings clarity to issues of supply and demand in this important market. Following a general overview of engineering-labor market trends, the volume examines the educational pathways of undergraduate engineers and their entry into the labor market, the impact of engineers working in firms on productivity and innovation, and different dimensions of the changing engineering labor market, from licensing to changes in demand and guest worker programs. The volume provides insights on engineering education, practice, and careers that can inform educational institutions, funding agencies, and policy makers about the challenges facing the United States in developing its engineering workforce in the global economy.

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This book is about some of the phonetic events that occur in the languages of the world. The data described consist mainly of contrasts observable at the systematic phonetic level in a wide variety of languages.

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This moving prose poem tells the story of an aged man who suffers a prolonged and ultimately fatal illness. From initial diagnosis to remission to relapse to death, the experience is narrated by the man's son, a practicing doctor. Charles Bardes, a physician and poet, draws on years of experience with patients and sickness to construct a narrative that links myth, diverse metamorphoses, and the modern mechanics of death. We stand with the doctors, the family, and, above all, a sick man and his disease as their voices are artfully crafted into a new and powerful language of illness.

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The Carnegie Corporation, among this country's oldest and most important foundations, has underwritten projects ranging from the writings of David Riesman to Sesame Street. Lagemann's lively history focuses on how foundations quietly but effectively use power and private money to influence public policies.

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That Africa—one of the superpowers' crucial diplomatic and economic battlegrounds—now verges on political developments as dramatic as those of eastern Europe compels us to consider the tremendous influence that East and West have wielded in recent African political development. Drawing from American diplomatic archives, firsthand interviews, and the African and international press, Zaki Laidï presents a historical analysis of how the dialectical relationships of the United States, Soviet Union, and African actors evolved to their present state. The lapse of European influence in the 1960s left a diplomatic void, which the superpowers rushed to fill. Just as Dien Bien Phû and the Suez crisis thrust Asia and the Near East, respectively, into the diplomatic spotlight, so the Angolan crisis lent a multifaceted cast to Africa's international relations. The ebb and flow of African crises is now linked to the rhythm of superpower relations, but Laidï is quick to warn that Africa's internal political circumstances shape the boundaries for external influence and constrain any efforts of the superpowers to exert total control. Laidï's provocative study, here in its first English translation, addresses diplomatic strategy, often neglected economic considerations, the growing influence of the Bretton Woods institutions, and the decline of French influence in Africa.

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Since its beginnings at the start of the 20th century, educational scholarship has been a marginal field, criticized by public policy makers and relegated to the fringes of academe. An Elusive Science explains why, providing a critical history of the traditions, conflicts, and institutions that have shaped the study of education over the past century.

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

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A celebrated figure in myth, song, and story, the nightingale has captivated the imagination for millennia, its complex song evoking a prism of human emotions,—from melancholy to joy, from the fear of death to the immortality of art. But have you ever listened closely to a nightingale’s song? It’s a strange and unsettling sort of composition—an eclectic assortment of chirps, whirrs, trills, clicks, whistles, twitters, and gurgles. At times it is mellifluous, at others downright guttural. It is a rhythmic assault, always eluding capture. What happens if you decide to join in? As philosopher and musician David Rothenberg shows in this searching and personal new book, the nightingale’s song is so peculiar in part because it reflects our own cacophony back at us. As vocal learners, nightingales acquire their music through the world around them, singing amidst the sounds of humanity in all its contradictions of noise and beauty, hard machinery and soft melody. Rather than try to capture a sound not made for us to understand, Rothenberg seeks these musical creatures out, clarinet in tow, and makes a new sound with them. He takes us to the urban landscape of Berlin—longtime home to nightingale colonies where the birds sing ever louder in order to be heard—and invites us to listen in on their remarkable collaboration as birds and instruments riff off of each other’s sounds. Through dialogue, travel records, sonograms, tours of Berlin’s city parks, and musings on the place animal music occupies in our collective imagination, Rothenberg takes us on a quest for a new sonic alchemy, a music impossible for any one species to make alone. In the tradition of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Invention of Nature, Rothenberg has written a provocative and accessible book to attune us ever closer to the natural environment around us.

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Louise Labe (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labe played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond with lyric skill to predecessors such as Sappho and Ovid. The first complete bilingual edition of this singular female author, "Complete Poetry and Prose" also features the only translations of Labe's sonnets to follow the exacting rhyme patterns of the originals and the first rhymed translation of Labe's elegies in their entirety.

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In this ambitious book, philosopher Otfried Höffe provides a sophisticated account of the principle of freedom and its role in the project of modernity. Höffe addresses a set of complex questions concerning the possibility of political justice and equity in the modern world, the destruction of nature, the dissolving of social cohesion, and the deregulation of uncontrollable markets. Through these considerations, he shows how the idea of freedom is central to modernity, and he assesses freedom’s influence in a number of cultural dimensions, including the natural, economic and social, artistic and scientific, political, ethical, and personal-metaphysical. Neither rejecting nor defending freedom and modernity, he instead explores both from a Kantian point of view, looking closely at the facets of freedom’s role and the fundamental position it has taken at the heart of modern life. Expanding beyond traditional philosophy, Critique of Freedom develops the building blocks of a critical theory of technology, environmental protection, economics, politics, medicine, and education. With a sophisticated yet straightforward style, Höffe draws on a range of disciplines in order to clearly distinguish and appreciate the many meanings of freedom and the indispensable role they play in liberal society.

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In this unsettling and innovative book, anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo addresses the problematic of the subject through a dual examination of psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, reflecting on the unconscious maladies of the soul at a time of tremendous global upheaval. Drawing on in-depth historical research and sensitively listening to contemporary patients in Morocco, she offers both an ethnographic journey through madness and contemporary formations of despair and a philosophical and theological exploration of the vicissitudes of the soul. Pandolfo's study spans a breadth that encompasses experiences of psychosis in psychiatric hospitals, visionary torments of the soul in urban life, the difficulty of undocumented migration, and the liturgical space of Quranic healing. Demonstrating how contemporary Islamic cures for madness address some of the core preoccupations of the psychoanalytic approach, she reveals how a religious and ethical relation to the "ordeal" of madness might actually allow for spiritual transformation. Altogether, this sophisticated work illuminates new dimensions of psychoanalysis and the ethical imagination while also sensitively examining the collective psychic strife that so many communities endure today.

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For more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses's term "fetishism" has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to "magic" but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses's term has proved indispensable to thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Derrida. With this book, Daniel H. Leonard offers the first fully annotated English translation of the text that started it all: On the Worship of Fetish Gods, and Rosalind C. Morris offers incisive commentary that helps modern readers better understand it and its legacy. The product of de Brosses's autodidactic curiosity and idiosyncratic theories of language, On the Worship of Fetish Gods is an enigmatic text that is often difficult for contemporary audiences to assess. In a thorough introduction to the text, Leonard situates de Brosses's work within the cultural and intellectual milieu of his time. Then, Morris traces the concept of fetishism through its extraordinary permutations as it was picked up and transformed by the fields of philosophy, comparative religion, political economy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Ultimately, she breaks new ground, moving into and beyond recent studies by thinkers such as William Pietz, Hartmut Bohme, Alfonso Iacono through illuminating, new discussions on topics ranging from translation issues to Africanity to new materialism.

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Paul A. Cantor first probed Shakespeare's Roman plays Coriolanus, Julius Caeser, and Antony and Cleopatra in his landmark Shakespeare's Rome (1976). With Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy, he now argues that these plays form an integrated trilogy that portrays the tragedy not simply of their protagonists but of an entire political community. Cantor analyzes the way Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Roman Empire. The transformation of the ancient city into a cosmopolitan empire marks the end of the era of civic virtue in antiquity, but it also opens up new spiritual possibilities that Shakespeare correlates with the rise of Christianity and thus the first stirrings of the medieval and the modern worlds. More broadly, Cantor places Shakespeare's plays in a long tradition of philosophical speculation about Rome, with special emphasis on Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two thinkers who provide important clues on how to read Shakespeare's works. In a pathbreaking chapter, he undertakes the first systematic comparison of Shakespeare and Nietzsche on Rome, exploring their central point of contention: Did Christianity corrupt the Roman Empire or was the corruption of the Empire the precondition of the rise of Christianity? Bringing Shakespeare into dialogue with other major thinkers about Rome, Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy reveals the true profundity of the Roman Plays.

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Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remains one of the more fascinating aspects of that era. As mind and emotion were increasingly understood in terms of biology, aesthetic experience began to be thought of less as abstract judgment and more as an interaction between the nervous system and the materiality of art. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others, to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way that nineteenth-century writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking aspects of contemporary literary and cultural criticism such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as being incontrovertibly intertwined.

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Long considered both best friend and worst enemy to humankind, fire is at once creative and destructive. In the endangered tropical paradise of Madagascar, the two faces of fires have fueled a century-long conflict between rural farmers and island leaders. For the farmers, wildland burning plays a key role in sustaining their agricultural livelihood and maintaining control of the island's rangelands, croplands, and woodlands. For the government, fire is the chief threat to the island's economic development and environmental stability. In Isle of Fire, Christian Kull argues that the antifire polemics of Madagascar's leadership are misdirected and that the most dangerous conflagration is the blaze that is fanned by the disagreements between outside authorities and farmers. Based on fieldwork in Malagasy villages and a thorough archival investigation, this volume offers detailed analysis of why Madagascar has always been atlame, why it always will be aflame, and ultimately, as Kull argues, why it should always be aflame.

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Taken together, these comprehensive volumes offer an authoritative account of the music of Africa. One of the most prominent experts on the subject, Gerhard Kubik draws on his extensive travels and three decades of study in many parts of the continent to compare and contrast a wealth of musical traditions from a range of cultures. In the first volume, Kubik describes and examines xylophone playing in southern Uganda and harp music from the Central African Republic; compares multi-part singing from across the continent; and explores movement and sound in eastern Angola. In the second volume, he turns to the cognitive study of African rhythm, Yoruba chantefables, the musical Kachamba family of Malawi, and African conceptions of space and time. Each volume features an extensive selection of photographs and is accompanied by a compact disc of Kubik's own recordings. Erudite and exhaustive, "Theory of African Music" will be an invaluable reference for years to come.

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Taken together, these comprehensive volumes offer an authoritative account of the music of Africa. One of the most prominent experts on the subject, Gerhard Kubik draws on his extensive travels and three decades of study in many parts of the continent to compare and contrast a wealth of musical traditions from a range of cultures. In the first volume, Kubik describes and examines xylophone playing in southern Uganda and harp music from the Central African Republic; compares multi-part singing from across the continent; and explores movement and sound in eastern Angola. In the second volume, he turns to the cognitive study of African rhythm, Yoruba chantefables, the musical Kachamba family of Malawi, and African conceptions of space and time. Each volume features an extensive selection of photographs and is accompanied by a compact disc of Kubik's own recordings. Erudite and exhaustive, "Theory of African Music" will be an invaluable reference for years to come.

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Start-ups and other entrepreneurial ventures make a significant contribution to the US economy, particularly in the tech sector, where they comprise some of the largest and most influential companies. Yet for every high-profile, high-growth company like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, many more fail. This enormous heterogeneity poses conceptual and measurement challenges for economists concerned with understanding their precise impact on economic growth. Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses brings together economists and data analysts to discuss the most recent research covering three broad themes. The first chapters isolate high- and low-performing entrepreneurial ventures and analyze their roles in creating jobs and driving innovation and productivity. The next chapters turn the focus on specific challenges entrepreneurs face and how they have varied over time, including over business cycles. The final chapters explore core measurement issues, with a focus on new data projects under development that may improve our understanding of this dynamic part of the economy.

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Charm, wit and style were critical, but dangerous, ingredients in the social repertoire of the Roman elite. Their use drew special attention, but also exposed one to potential ridicule or rejection for valuing style over substance. Brian A. Krostenko explores the complexities and ambiguities of charm, wit and style in Roman literature of the late Republic by tracking the origins, development and use of the terms that described them, which he calls "the language of social performance". As Krostenko desmonstrates, a key feature of this language is its capacity to express both approval and disdain - an artifact of its origins at a time when the "style" and "charm" of imported Greek cultural practices were greeted with both enthusiasm and hostility. Cicero played on that ambiguity, for example, by chastising "lepidus" ("fine") boys in the "Second Oration against Catiline" as degenerates, then arguing in his "De Oratore" that the successful speaker must have a certain charming "lepos" ("wit"). Catullus, in turn, exploited and inverted the political subtexts of this language for innovative poetic and erotic idioms.

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When the United States goes to war, the nation's attention focuses on the president. As commander in chief, a president reaches the zenith of power, while Congress is supposedly shunted to the sidelines once troops have been deployed abroad. Because of Congress' repeated failure to exercise its legislative powers to rein in presidents, many have proclaimed its irrelevance in military matters. After the Rubicon challenges this conventional wisdom by illuminating the diverse ways in which legislators influence the conduct of military affairs. Douglas L. Kriner reveals that even in politically sensitive wartime environments, individual members of Congress frequently propose legislation, hold investigative hearings, and engage in national policy debates in the public sphere. These actions influence the president's strategic decisions as he weighs the political costs of pursuing his preferred military course. Marshalling a wealth of quantitative and historical evidence, Kriner expertly demonstrates the full extent to which Congress materially shapes the initiation, scope, and duration of major military actions and sheds new light on the timely issue of interbranch relations.

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Did America try to steal Soviet "cancer secrets"? And how could a cancer cure turn into a "biological atomic bomb"? Nikolai Krementsov's compelling tale of cancer and politics is the story of a husband-and-wife team who developed a promising anticancer treatment in Stalin's Russia, only to see their discovery entangled in Cold War rivalries, ideological conflict, and scientific turf wars.In 1946, Nina Kliueva and Grigorii Roskin announced the discovery of a preparation able to "dissolve" tumors in mice. Preliminary clinical trials suggested that KR, named after its developers, might work in humans as well. Media hype surrounding KR prompted the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union to seek U.S.-Soviet cooperation in perfecting the possible cure. But the escalating Cold War gave this American interest a double edge. Though it helped Kliueva and Roskin solicit impressive research support from the Soviet leadership, including Stalin, it also thrust the couple into the center of an ideological confrontation between the superpowers. Accused of divulging "state secrets" to America, the couple were put on a show trial, and their "antipatriotic sins" were condemned in Soviet stage and film productions. Parlaying their notoriety into increased funding, Kliueva and Roskin continued their research, but envious colleagues discredited their work and took over their institute. For years, work on KR languished and ceased entirely with the deaths of Kliueva and Roskin. But recently, the Russian press reported that work on KR has begun again, reopening this illuminating story of the intersection among Cold War politics, personal ideals, and biomedical research.

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Politicians and pundits alike have complained that the divided governments of the last decades have led to a legislative gridlock. The author argues against this, advancing the theory that divided government actually has little effect on legislative productivity. Gridlock is in fact the order of the day, occurring even when the same party controls the legislative and executive branches. Anchored to real politics, the author argues that the pivotal vote on a piece of legislation is not the one that gives a bill simple majority, but the vote that allows its supporters to override a possible presidential veto. This theory of pivots also explains why, when bills are passed, winning coalitions usually are bipartisan and supermajority sized. Offering an account of when gridlock is overcome and showing that political parties are less important in legislative-executive politics than previously thought, this text offers a perspective on American lawmaking.

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Can today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all? In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history—such as prehistorical oral societies with robust storytelling cultures, or the great print works of nineteenth-century historicism—and our own instantaneous present. He concludes with a surprising look at how the sense of history exemplified in today’s JavaScript timelines compares to the temporality found in Romantic poetry. Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive “network archaeologies” can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other. These conceptual architectures of period and age are also always media structures, scaffolded with the outlines of what we mean by history. Thinking about our own time, Liu wonders if the digital, networked future can sustain a similar sense of history.

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The Existential Self in Society explores the ways in which we experience and shape our individuality in a rapidly changing social world. Kotarba and Fontana have gathered eleven original essays that form an exciting contribution and an ideal introduction to the emerging field of existential sociology.

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After World War II, Japanese intellectuals believed that world history was moving inexorably toward bourgeois democracy and then socialism. But who would be the agents - the active "subjects" - of that revolution in Japan? Intensely debated at the time, this question of active subjectivity influenced popular ideas about nationalism and social change that still affect Japanese political culture today. Here, J. Victor Koschmann analyzes the debate over subjectivity. He traces the arguments of intellectuals from various disciplines and political viewpoints, and asserts that despite their stress on individual autonomy, they all came to define subjectivity in terms of deterministic historical structures, thus ultimately deferring the possibility of radical change in Japan.

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In The Mediterranean Incarnate, anthropologist Naor Ben-Yehoyada takes us aboard the Naumachos for a thirty-seven-day voyage in the fishing grounds between Sicily and Tunisia. He also takes us on a historical exploration of the past eighty years to show how the Mediterranean has reemerged as a modern transnational region. From Sicilian poaching in North African territory to the construction of the TransMediterranean gas pipeline, Ben-Yehoyada examines the transformation of political action, imaginaries, and relations in the central Mediterranean while detailing the remarkable bonds that have formed between the Sicilians and Tunisians who live on its waters. The book centers on the town of Mazara del Vallo, located on the southwestern tip of Sicily some ninety nautical miles northeast of the African shore. Ben-Yehoyada intertwines the town's recent turbulent history which has been fraught with conflicts over fishing rights, development projects, and how the Mediterranean should figure in Italian politics at large with deep accounts of life aboard the Naumacho, linking ethnography with historical anthropology and political-economic analysis. Through this sophisticated approach, he crafts a new viewpoint on the historical processes of transnational region formation, one offered by these moving ships as they weave together new social and political constellations.

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Medical professionals, scientists, and patients have long grappled with the dubious nature of medical "certainty" regarding diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of disease states. Constructing certainty requires reductions and deductions. It requires us to take what we know now and make best guesses about what will be. We try to make peace with medical uncertainty by monitoring symptoms, modeling risk, and looking toward evidence. But bodies in flux always outpace the human gaze. With research, technologies, and patients themselves constantly changing, how do practitioners ultimately make decisions about care?Bodies in Flux looks at the many ways humans coproduce medical knowledge. Each chapter investigates one specific scientific method for negotiating medical uncertainty in cancer care, including evidential visualization, assessment, synthesis, and computation. The cases pull back the curtain to show doctors deliberating over the best ways to treat a patient, the FDA holding drug hearings to decide dosage, researchers synthesizing studies into evidence-based standards, and pharmaceutical companies designing genetic tests for consumers. Teston concludes by advocating for an ethic of care that embraces human bodies' flux and frailty.

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When political geography changes, how do reorganized or newly formed states justify their rule and create a sense of shared history for their people? Often, the essays in "Selective Remembrances" reveal, they turn to archaeology, employing the field and its findings to develop nationalistic feelings and forge legitimate distinctive national identities. Examining such relatively new or reconfigured nation-states as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, India, and Thailand, "Selective Remembrances" shows how states invoke the remote past to extol the glories of specific peoples or prove claims to ancestral homelands. Religion has long played a key role in such efforts, and the contributors take care to demonstrate the tendency of many people, including archaeologists themselves, to view the world through a religious lens - which can be exploited by new regimes to suppress objective study of the past and justify contemporary political actions. The wide geographic and intellectual range of the essays in "Selective Remembrances" will make it a seminal text for archaeologists and historians.

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Leszek Kolakowski delves into some of the most intellectually vigorous questions of our time in this remarkable collection of essays garnished with his characteristic wit. Ten of the essays have never appeared before in English. "Exemplary. . . . It should be celebrated." —Arthur C. Danto, New York Times Book Review"This book . . . express[es] Kolakowski's thought on God, man, reason, history, moral truth and original sin, prompted by observation of the dramatic struggle among Christianity, the Enlightenment and modern totalitarianism. It is a wonderful collection of topics." —Thomas Nagel, Times Literary Supplement"No better antidote to bumper-sticker thinking exists than this collection of 24 'appeals for moderation in consistency,' and never has such an antidote been needed more than it is now." —Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune"Whether learned or humorous, these essays offer gems in prose of diamond hardness, precision, and brilliance." —Thomas D'Evelyn, The Christian Science MonitorA "Notable Books of the Year 1991" selection, New York Times Book Review—a "Noted with Pleasure" selection, New York Times Book Review—a "Summer Reading 1991" selection, New York Times Book Review—a "Books of the Year" selection, The Times.

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What is it like to do field biology in a world that exalts experiments and laboratories? How have field biologists assimilated laboratory values and practices and crafted an exact, quantitative science without losing their naturalist souls? In "Landscapes and Labscapes", Robert E. Kohler explores the people, places and practices of field biology in the United States from the 1890s to the 1950s. He takes readers into the fields and forests where field biologists learned to count and measure nature and to read the imperfect records of "nature's experiments". He shows how field researchers use nature's particularities to develop "practices of place" that achieve in nature what laboratory researchers can only do with simplified experiments. Using historical frontiers as models, Kohler shows how biologists created vigorous new border sciences of ecology and evolutionary biology.

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In the modern Congress, one of the highest hurdles for major bills or nominations is gaining the sixty votes necessary to shut off a filibuster in the Senate. But this wasn't always the case. Both citizens and scholars tend to think of the legislative process as a game played by the rules in which votes are the critical commodity - the side that has the most votes wins. In this comprehensive volume, Gregory Koger shows, on the contrary, that filibustering is a game with slippery rules in which legislators who think fast and try hard can triumph over superior numbers. "Filibustering" explains how and why obstruction has been institutionalized in the U.S. Senate over the last fifty years, and how this transformation affects politics and policy making. Koger also traces the lively history of filibustering in the U.S. House during the nineteenth century and measures the effects of filibustering - bills killed, compromises struck, and new issues raised by obstruction. Unparalleled in the depth of its theory and its combination of historical and political analysis, "Filibustering" will be the definitive study of its subject for years to come.

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In 1997 the United Kingdom returned control of Hong Kong to China, ending the city's status as one of the last remnants of the British Empire and initiating a new phase for it as both a modern city and a hub for global migrations. "Hong Kong" is a tour of the city's post colonial urban landscape, innovatively told through fieldwork and photography. Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper's point of entry into Hong Kong is the unusual position of the British expatriates who chose to remain in the city after the transition. Now a relatively insignificant presence, British migrants in Hong Kong have become intimately connected with another small minority group there: immigrants from Southeast Asia. The lives, journeys, and stories of these two groups bring to life a place where the past continues to resonate for all its residents, even as the city hurtles forward into a future marked by transience and transition. By skillfully blending ethnographic and visual approaches, "Hong Kong" offers a fascinating guide to a city that is at once unique in its recent history and exemplary of our globalized present.

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Though you may not know his name, Robert Welch (1899-1985)—founder of the John Birch Society—is easily one of the most significant architects of our current political moment. In A Conspiratorial Life, the first biography of Welch, Edward H. Miller delves deep into the life of an overlooked figure whose ideas nevertheless reshaped the American right. A child prodigy who entered college at age 12, Welch became an unlikely candy magnate, founding the company that created Sugar Daddies, Junior Mints, and other famed confections. In 1958, he funneled his wealth into establishing the organization that would define his legacy and change the face of American politics: the John Birch Society. Though the group’s paranoiac right-wing nativism was dismissed by conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley, its ideas gradually moved from the far-right fringe into the mainstream. By exploring the development of Welch’s political worldview, A Conspiratorial Life shows how the John Birch Society’s rabid libertarianism—and its highly effective grassroots networking—became a profound, yet often ignored or derided influence on the modern Republican Party. Miller convincingly connects the accusatory conservatism of the midcentury John Birch Society to the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party, the Trump administration, Q, and more. As this book makes clear, whether or not you know his name or what he accomplished, it’s hard to deny that we’re living in Robert Welch’s America.

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Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the specter of an intense gender debate about the very nature of childhood. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate, probing deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales." Ventures into Childland will delight and instruct all readers of children's classics, and will be essential reading for students of Victorian culture and gender studies."Ventures into Childland is acute, well written and stimulating. It also has a political purpose, to insist on the importance of protecting and nurturing children, imaginatively and physically."—Jan Marsh, Times Literary Supplement"A provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture."—Library Journal

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Tell me all about your trip! It's a request that follows travelers as they head out into the world, and one of the first things they hear when they return. When we leave our homes to explore the wider world, we feel compelled to capture the experiences and bring the story home. But for those who don't think of themselves as writers, putting experiences into words can become more stressful than inspirational.Writing Abroad is meant for travelers of all backgrounds and writing levels: a student embarking on overseas study; a retiree realizing a dream of seeing China; a Peace Corps worker in Kenya. All can benefit from documenting their adventures. Through practical advice and adaptable exercises, this guide will help travelers hone their observational skills, conduct research and interviews, choose an appropriate literary form and incorporate photos and videos into their writing. Writing about travel is more than just safeguarding memories it can transform experiences and tease out new realizations. With Writing Abroad, travelers will be able to deepen their understanding of other cultures and write about that new awareness in clear and vivid prose.

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American life is filled with talk of progress and equality, especially when the issue is that of race. But has the history of race in America really been the continuous march toward equality we'd like to imagine it has? This sweeping history of race in America argues quite the opposite; that progress toward equality has been sporadic, isolated, and surrounded by long periods of stagnation and retrenchment.

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Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remains one of the more fascinating aspects of that era. As mind and emotion were increasingly understood in terms of biology, aesthetic experience began to be thought of less as abstract judgment and more as an interaction between the nervous system and the materiality of art. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others, to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way that nineteenth-century writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking aspects of contemporary literary and cultural criticism such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as being incontrovertibly intertwined.

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Sentencing Policies and Practices in Western Countries: Comparative and Cross-national Perspectives is the forty-fifth addition to the Crime and Justice series. Contributors include Thomas Weigend on criminal sentencing in Germany since 2000; Julian V. Roberts and Andrew Ashworth on the evolution of sentencing policy and practice in England and Wales from 2003 to 2015; Jacqueline Hodgson and Laurene Soubise on understanding the sentencing process in France; Anthony N. Doob and Cheryl Marie Webster on Canadian sentencing policy in the twenty-first century; Arie Freiberg on Australian sentencing policies and practices; Krzysztof Krajewski on sentencing in Poland; Alessandro Corda on Italian policies; Michael Tonry on American sentencing; and Tapio Lappi-Seppala on penal policy and sentencing in the Nordic countries.

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Why have both Great Britain and the United States been unable to create effective training and work programmes for the unemployed? The author contends that the answer lies in the liberal political origins of these programmes. Integrating documentary materials with an analysis of the sources of political support for work-welfare programs, King shows that policy-makers in both Great Britain and the United States have tried to achieve conflicting goals through these programmes. The goal of work-welfare policy in both countries has been to provide financial aid, training and placement services for the unemployed. In order to muster support for these programmes, however, work-welfare programmes had to incorporate liberal requirements that they not interfere with private market forces, and that they prevent the "undeserving" from obtaining benefits. The attempt to integrate these incompatible functions is arguably the defining feature of British and American policies as well as the cause of their failure.

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For most bills in American legislature, the issue of turf - or which committee has jurisdiction over a bill - is crucial. This study explains how jurisdictional areas for committees are created and changed in Congress, and dissects the politics of "turf-grabbing". Political scientists have long maintained that jurisdictions are relatively static, changing only at times of dramatic reforms. David King disagrees with this premise and, combining quantitative evidence with interviews and case studies, he shows how ongoing turf wars make jurisdictions fluid. He argues that jurisdictional change stems both from legislators seeking electoral advantage and from nonpartisan House parliamentarians referring ambiguous bills to committees with the expertise to handle the issues. King shows how parliamentarians have become institutional guardians of the legislative process.

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Ethnocentrism - our tendency to partition the human world into in-groups and out-groups - pervades societies around the world. Surprisingly, though, few scholars have explored its role in political life. Donald R. Kinder and Cindy D. Kam fill this gap with "Us Against Them", their definitive explanation of how ethnocentrism shapes American public opinion. Arguing that humans are broadly predisposed to ethnocentrism, Kinder and Kam explore its impact on our attitudes toward an array of issues, including the war on terror, humanitarian assistance, immigration, the sanctity of marriage, and the reform of social programs. The authors ground their study in previous theories from a wide range of disciplines, establishing a new framework for understanding what ethnocentrism is and how it becomes politically consequential. They also marshal a vast trove of survey evidence to identify the conditions under which ethnocentrism shapes public opinion. While ethnocentrism is widespread in the United States, the authors demonstrate that its political relevance depends on circumstance. Exploring the implications of these findings for political knowledge, cosmopolitanism, and societies outside the United States, Kinder and Kam add a new dimension to our understanding of how democracy functions.

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