Search results for ""university of chicago press""

The verb is, in any language, the motor of all communication: no verb, no action. In Greek, verb forms change not only with person, number, tense, and voice, but in four possible moods as well. "The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek" is an incomparable resource for students and scholars charged with the considerable task of untangling the Greek language's many complexities. With clear, concise instruction, Albert Rijksbaron shows how the various verb forms contribute to the richness of Greek literature as we know it, in this essential guide for both novices and experienced practitioners.

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Paul Riesman's Freedom in Fulani Social Life is based upon his two years of residence among the Jelgobe, a group of semi-nomadic Fulani of the Sahel in Upper Volta, western Africa. Since its original publication, this classic study has profoundly influenced the field of anthropology through its re-examination of the enthnographer's personal input on his research. "Freedom in Fulani Social Life richly documents how the ethnographer's own personal and cultural background is implicated in the research process...For this reason, [Riesman's] book will be of paramount interest to all ethnographers."--Philip L. Kilbride, Reviews in Anthropology "A remarkably well-written and insightful account of Fulani life...In addition to using the conventional approaches of participating in and observing the daily activities of the Jelgobe ...Riesman enriches his account by examining his personal feelings about particular incidents."--Library Journal "An interesting and provocative study."--Choice At the time of his death in 1988, Paul Riesman was an anthropologist who taught at Carleton College.

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In an era when knowledge can travel with astonishing speed, the need for analysis of intellectual property (IP) law—and its focus on patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and issues of copyright—has never been greater. But as Robert M. Farley and Davida H. Isaacs stress in Patents for Power, we have long overlooked critical ties between IP law and one area of worldwide concern: military technology. This deft blend of case studies, theoretical analyses, and policy advice reveals the fundamental role of IP law in shaping how states create and transmit defense equipment and weaponry. The book probes two major issues: the effect of IP law on innovation itself and the effect of IP law on the international diffusion, or sharing, of technology. Discussing a range of inventions, from the AK-47 rifle to the B-29 Superfortress bomber to the MQ-1 Predator drone, the authors show how IP systems (or their lack) have impacted domestic and international relations across a number of countries, including the United States, Russia, China, and South Korea. The study finds, among other results, that while the open nature of the IP system may encourage industrial espionage like cyberwarfare, increased state uptake of IP law is helping to establish international standards for IP protection. This clear-eyed approach to law and national security is thus essential for anyone interested in history, political science, and legal studies.

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This study discusses six crucial passages from the Old Testament, offering a commentary and new insights into their meaning. Employing a historical-critical method, the text takes account of archaeological, philological and historical research. This method is expanded to include the dynamic tradition of reading Scripture, including developments subsequent to the production of the original literary text. Also taken into account is the relation between the texts and the historical communities who read and interpreted them, together with philosophical speculation. The commentaries highlight the metaphorical structure of the passages and how they have served as catalysts for philosophical thinking from the Greeks to the modern age. Reading the Bible through different but complementary perspectives, the book seeks to reveal the familiar texts as vibrant, philosophically consequential and endlessly absorbing. The passages discussed are: the story of Adam and Eve; the commandment "thou shalt not kill"; "the valley of dry bones" passage from Ezekiel; Psalm 22; the "Song of Songs"; and the naming of God in Exodus 3;14.

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When Trump became president, much of the country was repelled by what they saw as the vulgar spectacle of his ascent, a perversion of the highest office in the land. In his bold, innovative book, Political Perversion, rhetorician Joshua Gunn argues that this "mean-spirited turn" in American politics (of which Trump is the paragon) is best understood as a structural perversion in our common culture, on a continuum with infantile and "gotcha" forms of entertainment meant to engender provocation and sadistic enjoyment. Drawing on insights from critical theory, media ecology, and psychoanalysis, Gunn argues that perverse rhetorics dominate not only the political sphere but also our daily interactions with others, in person and online. From sexting to campaign rhetoric, Gunn advances a new way to interpret our contemporary political context that explains why so many of us have difficulty deciphering the appeal of aberrant public figures. In this book, Trump is only the tip of a sinister, rapidly growing iceberg, one to which we ourselves unwittingly contribute on a daily basis.

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In volume 1 of this three-volume work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing. Now, in volume 2, he examines these relations in fiction and theories of literature. Ricoeur treats the question of just how far the Aristotelian concept of "plot" in narrative fiction can be expanded and whether there is a point at which narrative fiction as a literary form not only blurs at the edges but ceases to exist at all. Though some semiotic theorists have proposed all fiction can be reduced to an atemporal structure, Ricoeur argues that fiction depends on the reader's understanding of narrative traditions, which do evolve but necessarily include a temporal dimension. He looks at how time is actually expressed in narrative fiction, particularly through use of tenses, point of view, and voice. He applies this approach to three books that are, in a sense, tales about time: Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway; Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain; and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. "Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear."—Eugen Weber, New York Times Book Review "A major work of literary theory and criticism under the aegis of philosophical hermenutics. I believe that . . . it will come to have an impact greater than that of Gadamer's Truth and Method—a work it both supplements and transcends in its contribution to our understanding of the meaning of texts and their relationship to the world."—Robert Detweiler, Religion and Literature"One cannot fail to be impressed by Ricoeur's encyclopedic knowledge of the subject under consideration. . . . To students of rhetoric, the importance of Time and Narrative . . . is all too evident to require extensive elaboration."—Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Quarterly Journal of Speech

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The “infrathin” was Marcel Duchamp’s playful name for the most minute shade of difference: that between the report of a gunshot and the appearance of the bullet hole, or between two objects in a series made from the same mold. “Eat” is not the same thing as “ate.” The poetic, Marjorie Perloff suggests, can best be understood as the language of infrathin. For in poetry, whether in verse or prose, words and phrases that are seemingly unrelated in ordinary discourse are realigned by means of sound, visual layout, etymology, grammar, and construction so as to “make it new.” In her revisionist “micropoetics,” Perloff draws primarily on major modernist poets from Stein and Yeats to Beckett, suggesting that the usual emphasis on what this or that poem is “about,” does not do justice to its infrathin possibilities. From Goethe’s eight-line “Wanderer’s Night Song” to Eliot’s Four Quartets, to the minimalist lyric of Rae Armantrout, Infrathin is designed to challenge our current habits of reading and to answer the central question: what is it that makes poetry poetry?

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States of Exception in American History brings to light the remarkable number of instances since the Founding in which the protections of the Constitution have been overridden, held in abeyance, or deliberately weakened for certain members of the polity. In the United States, derogations from the rule of law seem to have been a feature of—not a bug in—the constitutional system. The first comprehensive account of the politics of exceptions and emergencies in the history of the United States, this book weaves together historical studies of moments and spaces of exception with conceptual analyses of emergency, the state of exception, sovereignty, and dictatorship. The Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Cold War figure prominently in the essays; so do Francis Lieber, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, Clinton Rossiter, and others who explored whether it was possible for the United States to survive states of emergency without losing its democratic way. States of Exception combines political theory and the history of political thought with histories of race and political institutions. It is both inspired by and illuminating of the American experience with constitutional rule in the age of terror and Trump.

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From the 1790s until World War I, Western museums filled their shelves with art and antiquities from around the world. These objects are now widely seen as "stolen" or "plundered" from their countries of origin, and demands for their return grow louder by the day. In this pathbreaking study, Justin M. Jacobs challenges the longstanding assumption that coercion, corruption, and deceit were chiefly responsible for the exodus of cultural treasures from northwestern China. Based upon a close analysis of previously neglected archival sources in English, French, and Chinese, Jacobs finds that many local elites in China acquiesced to the removal of art and antiquities abroad, understanding their trade as currency for a cosmopolitan elite. In the decades after the 1911 Revolution, however, these antiquities went from being "diplomatic capital" to disputed icons of the emerging nation-state. A new generation of Chinese scholars began to criminalize the prior activities of archaeologists, erasing all memory of the pragmatic barter relationship that once existed in China. Recovering the voices of those local officials, scholars, and laborers who shaped the global trade in antiquities, The Compensations of Plunder brings historical grounding to a highly contentious topic in modern Chinese history and informs heated debates over cultural restitution throughout the world.

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Much like our own time, the ancient Greek world was constantly expanding and becoming more connected to global networks. The landscape was shaped by an ecology of city-states, local formations that were stitched into the wider Mediterranean world. While the local is often seen as less significant than the global stage of politics, religion, and culture, localism, argues historian Hans Beck has had a pervasive influence on communal experience in a world of fast-paced change. Far from existing as outliers, citizens in these communities were deeply concerned with maintaining local identity, commercial freedom, distinct religious cults, and much more. Beyond these cultural identifiers, there lay a deeper concept of the local that guided polis societies in their contact with a rapidly expanding world. Drawing on a staggering range of materials----including texts by both known and obscure writers, numismatics, pottery analysis, and archeological records--Beck develops fine-grained case studies that illustrate the significance of the local experience. Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State builds bridges across disciplines and ideas within the humanities and shows how looking back at the history of Greek localism is important not only in the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, but also in today's conversations about globalism, networks, and migration.

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Fernando Vidal’s trailblazing text on the origins of psychology traces the development of the discipline from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth. Originally published in 2011, The Sciences of the Soul continues to be of wide importance in the history and philosophy of psychology, the history of the human sciences more generally, and in the social and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe.

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Amid the crowded streets of Chester, guild players portraying biblical characters performed on colorful mobile stages hoping to draw the attention of fellow townspeople. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these Chester plays employed flamboyant live performance to adapt biblical narratives. But the original format of these fascinating performances remains cloudy, as surviving records of these plays are sparse, and the manuscripts were only written down a generation after they stopped. Revealing a vibrant set of social practices encoded in the Chester plays, Matthew Sergi provides a new methodology for reading them and a transformative look at medieval English drama. Carefully combing through the plays, Sergi seeks out cues in the dialogues that reveal information about the original staging, design, and acting. These "practical cues," as he calls them, have gone largely unnoticed by drama scholars, who have focused on the ideology and historical contexts of these plays, rather than the methods, mechanics, and structures of the actual performances. Drawing on his experience as an actor and director, he combines close readings of these texts with fragments of records, revealing a new way to understand how the Chester plays brought biblical narratives to spectators in the noisy streets. For Sergi, plays that once appeared only as dry religious dramas come to life as raucous participatory spectacles filled with humor, camp, and devotion.

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With Respect to Sex is an intimate ethnography that offers a provocative account of sexual and social difference in India. The subjects of this study are hijras or the "third sex" of India—individuals who occupy a unique, liminal space between male and female, sacred and profane.Hijras are men who sacrifice their genitalia to a goddess in return for the power to confer fertility on newlyweds and newborn children, a ritual role they are respected for, at the same time as they are stigmatized for their ambiguous sexuality. By focusing on the hijra community, Gayatri Reddy sheds new light on Indian society and the intricate negotiations of identity across various domains of everyday life. Further, by reframing hijra identity through the local economy of respect, this ethnography highlights the complex relationships among local and global, sexual and moral, economies.This book will be regarded as the definitive work on hijras, one that will be of enormous interest to anthropologists, students of South Asian culture, and specialists in the study of gender and sexuality.

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The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare. In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.

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For the past fifty years anxiety over the problem of naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side pursues the idea of social science as another kind of natural science, while the other radically rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. All of the various developments in social scientific theory since then have reflected this dichotomy between naturalism and post-modernism. "Interpretation and Social Knowledge" suggests a third way, reframing this debate and offering a synthetic vision that sets out a new understanding of sociological interpretation. Analyzing the work of writers such as Theda Skocpol, Clifford Geertz, Leela Gandhi, Roy Bhaskar, Foucault, and Habermas, Isaac Ariail Reed delineates three epistemic modes of social research: realism, normativism, and interpretivism. Reed argues that the last mode provides a way forward for an anti-naturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena. Both an examination of and a theoretical meditation on how social investigators do their work, "Interpretation and Social Knowledge" is an ingenious and fruitful exploration of what makes the human sciences uniquely capable of revealing and explaining our world.

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This volume combines two classic works of anthropology. The Little Community draws on the author's own notable studies of the villages of Tepoztlan and Chan Kom to explore the means by which scientists try to understand human communities. It contains, wrote Margaret Mead, "the essence of Robert Redfield's multifaceted contributions to the place of community studies in social science." Peasant Society and Culture outlines a speculative foundation for the emergence of anthropology from the study of isolated primitive tribes.

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By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the "Pearl of the Danube," it boasted some of Europe's most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city's liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siecle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest is the riveting story of non-normative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961. Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to tolerate, protect, and contain queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence between the illiberal state and queer community ended abruptly at the close of World War II. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality's political implications, Queer Budapest recuperates queer communities as an integral part of Budapest's--and Hungary's--modern incarnation.

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Drawing from almost a decade of ethnographic research in largely Brazilian and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, in "Street Therapists", examines how affect, emotion, and sentiment serve as waypoints for the navigation of interracial relationships among US-born Latinos, Latin American migrants, blacks, and white ethnics. Tackling a rarely studied dynamic approach to affect, Ramos-Zayas offers a thorough - and sometimes paradoxical - new articulation of race, space, and neoliberalism in US urban communities. After looking at the historical, political, and economic contexts in which an intensified connection between affect and race has emerged in Newark, "Street Therapists" engages in detailed examinations of various community sites - including high schools, workplaces, beauty salons, and funeral homes, among others - and secondary sites in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and San Juan to uncover the ways US-born Latinos and Latin American migrants interpret and analyze everyday racial encounters through a language of psychology and emotions. As Ramos-Zayas notes, this emotive approach to race resurrects Latin American and Caribbean ideologies of "racial democracy" in an urban US context - and often leads to new psychological stereotypes and forms of social exclusion. Extensively researched and thoughtfully argued, "Street Therapists" theorizes the conflictive connection between race, affect, and urban neoliberalism.

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We need to talk about racism before it destroys our democracy. And that conversation needs to start with an acknowledgement that racism is coded into even the most ordinary interactions. Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States—especially white people—do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations. This leads us to act with implicit biases that can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a resume. This is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation. In Tacit Racism, Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck illustrate the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans, in what they call Interaction Orders of Race. They argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a “color-blind” nation, we are harming not only our society’s most disadvantaged—but endangering the society itself. Ultimately, by exposing this legacy of racism in ordinary social interactions, Rawls and Duck hope to stop us from merely pretending we are a democratic society and show us how we can truly become one.

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In this book Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas explores how Puerto Ricans in Chicago construct and perform nationalism. Contrary to characterizations of nationalism as a primarily unifying force, Ramos-Zayas finds that it actually provides the vocabulary to highlight distinctions along class, gender, racial and generational lines among Puerto Ricans, as well as between Puerto Ricans and other Latino, black and white populations. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Ramos-Zayas shows how the performance of Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago serves as a critique of social inequality, colonialism and imperialism, allowing barrio residents and others to challenge the notion that upward social mobility is equally available to all Americans - or all Puerto Ricans. Paradoxically, however, these activists' efforts also promote upward social mobility, overturning previous notions that resentment and marginalization are the main results of nationalist strategies. Ramos-Zayas's groundbreaking work allows her here to offer one of the most original and complex analyses of contemporary nationalism and Latino identity in the United States.

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From Langston Hughes's lynch poems to Sylvia Plath's father elegies, modern poetry has tried to find a language of mourning in an age of mass death, religious doubt and forgotten ritual. For this reason, Jahan Ramazani argues, the elegy, one of the most ancient of poetic genres, has remained one of the most vital to modern poets. Through readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems and the blues, Ramazani aims to enrich our critical understanding of a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. He also interprets the signal contributions to the American family elegy of Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Michael Harper and Amy Clampitt. Finally, he suggests analogies between the elegy and other kinds of contemporary mourning art - in particular, the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning, Ramazani's readings also draw on various historical, formal and feminist critical approaches. This book is intended for anyone concerned with the psychology of mourning or the history of modern poetry.

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For as long as women have battled for equitable political representation in America, those battles have been defined by images—whether illustrations, engravings, photographs, or colorful chromolithograph posters. Some of these pictures have been flattering, many have been condescending, and others downright incendiary. They have drawn upon prevailing cultural ideas of women’s perceived roles and abilities and often have been circulated with pointedly political objectives.Picturing Political Power offers perhaps the most comprehensive analysis yet of the connection between images, gender, and power. In this examination of the fights that led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Allison K. Lange explores how suffragists pioneered one of the first extensive visual campaigns in modern American history. She shows how pictures, from early engravings and photographs to colorful posters, proved central to suffragists’ efforts to change expectations for women, fighting back against the accepted norms of their times. In seeking to transform notions of womanhood and win the right to vote, white suffragists emphasized the compatibility of voting and motherhood, while Sojourner Truth and other leading suffragists of color employed pictures to secure respect and authority. Picturing Political Power demonstrates the centrality of visual politics to American women’s campaigns throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing the power of images to change history.

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This study, extending well beyond military history, documents the ways in which five different countries - Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, China, and Japan - refashioned their armed forces along European lines during the three centuries after 1600. The appropriation of Western military institutions in countries outside of Europe was, Ralston argues, the major force driving these countries to adopt European administrative, economic and cultural modes. The author follows the same format in his discussion of each country.

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For most people, grocery shopping is a mundane activity. Few stop to think about the massive, global infrastructure that makes it possible to buy Chilean grapes in a Philadelphia supermarket in the middle of winter. Yet every piece of food represents an interlocking system of agriculture, manufacturing, shipping, logistics, retailing, and nonprofits that controls what we eat—or don’t.The Problem with Feeding Cities is a sociological and historical examination of how this remarkable network of abundance and convenience came into being over the last century. It looks at how the US food system transformed from feeding communities to feeding the entire nation, and it reveals how a process that was once about fulfilling basic needs became focused on satisfying profit margins. It is also a story of how this system fails to feed people, especially in the creation of food deserts. Andrew Deener shows that problems with food access are the result of infrastructural failings stemming from how markets and cities were developed, how distribution systems were built, and how organizations coordinate the quality and movement of food. He profiles hundreds of people connected through the food chain, from farmers, wholesalers, and supermarket executives, to global shippers, logistics experts, and cold-storage operators, to food bank employees and public health advocates. It is a book that will change the way we see our grocery store trips and will encourage us all to rethink the way we eat in this country.

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Meet the people who design the algorithms that capture our musical tastes. The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners’ horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. But for their critics, recommender systems seem to embody all the potential harms of algorithms: they flatten culture into numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and they profile their users for commercial ends. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologist Nick Seaver describes how the makers of music recommendation navigate these tensions: how product managers understand their relationship with the users they want to help and to capture; how scientists conceive of listening itself as a kind of data processing; and how engineers imagine the geography of the world of music as a space they care for and control. Computing Taste rehumanizes the algorithmic systems that shape our world, drawing attention to the people who build and maintain them. In this vividly theorized book, Seaver brings the thinking of programmers into conversation with the discipline of anthropology, opening up the cultural world of computation in a wide-ranging exploration that travels from cosmology to calculation, myth to machine learning, and captivation to care.

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"A spectre lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race", write Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman in their introduction. Yet the intimate relationship between race and music has rarely been examined by contemporary scholars, most of whom have abandoned it for more enlightened notions of ethnicity and culture. Here, a distinguished group of contributors confront the issue head on. Representing an unusually broad range of academic disciplines and geographic regions, they critically examine how the imagination of race has influenced musical production, reception and scholarly analysis, even as they reject the objectivity of the concept itself. Each essay follows the lead of the substantial introduction, which reviews the history of race in European and American, non-Western and global musics, placing it within the contexts of the colonial experience and the more recent formation of "world music". Offering a bold, new revisionist agenda for musicology in a postmodern, postcolonial world, this book should appeal to students of culture and race across the humanities and social sciences.

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What is black music? For some it is a unique expression of the African-American experience, its soulful vocals and stirring rhythms forged in the fires of black resistance in response to centuries of oppression. But as Ronald Radano argues in this bracing work, the whole idea of black music has a much longer and more complicated history-one that speaks as much of musical and racial integration as it does of separation.

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In 1993, an American biotechnology company and a French genetics lab developed a collaborative research plan to search for diabetes genes. But just as the project was to begin, the French government called it to a halt, barring the laboratory from sharing something never previously thought of as a commodity unto itself: French DNA.

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This is a behind-the-scenes account of the invention of one of the most significant biotechnological discoveries in our time - the polymerase chain reaction. Transforming the practice and potential of molecular biology, PCR extends scientists' ability to identify and manipulate genetic materials and accurately reproduces millions of copies of a given segment in a short period of time. It makes abundant what was once scarce - the genetic material required for experimentation. This study explores the culture of biotechnology as it emerged at Cetus Corporation during the 1980s and focuses on its distinctive configuration of scientific, technical, social, economic, political, and legal elements, each of which had its own separate trajectory over the preceding decade. The book contains interviews with the cast of characters who made PCR, including Kary Mullin, the maverick who received the Nobel prize for "discovering" it, as well as the team of young scientists and the company's business leaders. This book shows how a contingently-assembled practice emerged, composed of distinctive subjects, the site where they worked, and the object they invented.

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One of Jacques Derrida's richest and most provocative works, Life Death challenges and deconstructs one of the most deeply rooted dichotomies of Western thought: life and death. Here Derrida rethinks the traditional philosophical understanding of the relationship between life and death, undertaking multidisciplinary analyses of a range of topics, including philosophy, linguistics, and the life sciences. In seeking to understand the relationship between life and death, he engages in close readings of Freudian psychoanalysis, the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, French geneticist Francois Jacob, and epistemologist Georges Canguilhem. Derrida gave his "Life Death" seminar over fourteen sessions between 1975 and 1976 at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris as part of the preparation for students studying for the agregation, a notoriously competitive qualifying exam. The theme for the exam that year was "Life and Death," but Derrida made a critical modification to the title by dropping the coordinating conjunction. The resulting title of Life Death poses a philosophical question about the close relationship between life and death. Derrida argues that death must be considered neither as the opposite of life nor as the truth or fulfillment of it, but rather as that which both limits life and makes it possible. Through these captivating sessions, Derrida thus not only questions traditional understandings of the relationship between life and death, but also ultimately develops a new way of thinking about what he calls "life death."

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The ideas at the root of quantum theory remain stubbornly, famously bizarre: a solid world reduced to puffs of probability; particles that tunnel through walls; cats suspended in zombielike states, neither alive nor dead; and twinned particles that share entangled fates. For more than a century, physicists have grappled with these conceptual uncertainties while enmeshed in the larger uncertainties of the social and political worlds around them, a time pocked by the rise of fascism, cataclysmic world wars, and a new nuclear age. In Quantum Legacies, David Kaiser introduces readers to iconic episodes in physicists’ still-unfolding quest to understand space, time, and matter at their most fundamental. In a series of vibrant essays, Kaiser takes us inside moments of discovery and debate among the great minds of the era—Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Stephen Hawking, and many more who have indelibly shaped our understanding of nature—as they have tried to make sense of a messy world. Ranging across space and time, the episodes span the heady 1920s, the dark days of the 1930s, the turbulence of the Cold War, and the peculiar political realities that followed. In those eras as in our own, researchers’ ambition has often been to transcend the vagaries of here and now, to contribute lasting insights into how the world works that might reach beyond a given researcher’s limited view. In Quantum Legacies, Kaiser unveils the difficult and unsteady work required to forge some shared understanding between individuals and across generations, and in doing so, he illuminates the deep ties between scientific exploration and the human condition.

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African American voters are a key demographic to the modern Democratic base, and conventional wisdom has it that there is political cost to racialized "dog whistles," especially for Democratic candidates. However, politicians from both parties and from all racial backgrounds continually appeal to negative racial attitudes for political gain. Challenging what we think we know about race and politics, LaFleur Stephens-Dougan argues that candidates across the racial and political spectrum engage in "racial distancing," or using negative racial appeals to communicate to racially moderate and conservative whites--the overwhelming majority of whites--that they will not disrupt the racial status quo. Race to the Bottom closely examines empirical data on racialized partisan stereotypes to show that engaging in racial distancing through political platforms that do not address the needs of nonwhite communities and charged rhetoric that targets African Americans, immigrants, and others can be politically advantageous. Racialized communication persists as a well-worn campaign strategy because it has real electoral value for both white and black politicians seeking to broaden their coalitions. Stephens-Dougan reveals that claims of racial progress have been overstated as our politicians are incentivized to employ racial prejudices at the expense of the most marginalized in our society.

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When we think of Catholicism, we think of Europe and the United States as the seats of its power. But while much of Catholicism remains headquartered in the West, the Church’s center of gravity has shifted to Africa, Latin America, and developing Asia. Focused on the transnational Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Unequal Partners explores the ways gender, race, economic inequality, and colonial history play out in religious organizations, revealing how their members are constantly negotiating and reworking the frameworks within which they operate. Taking us from Belgium and the United States to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sociologist Casey Clevenger offers rare insight into how the sisters of this order work across national boundaries, shedding light on the complex relationships among individuals, social groups, and formal organizations. Throughout, Clevenger skillfully weaves the sisters’ own voices into her narrative, helping us understand how the order has remained whole over time. A thoughtful analysis of the ties that bind—and divide—the sisters, Unequal Partners is a rich look at transnationalism’s ongoing impact on Catholicism.

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The number of immigrants in the US science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce and among recipients of advanced STEM degrees at US universities has increased in recent decades. In light of the current public debate about immigration, there is a need for evidence on the economic impacts of immigrants on the STEM workforce and on innovation. Using new data and state-of-the-art empirical methods, this volume examines various aspects of the relationships between immigration, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the effects of changes in the number of immigrants and their skill composition on the rate of innovation; the relationship between high-skilled immigration and entrepreneurship; and the differences between immigrant and native entrepreneurs. It presents new evidence on the postgraduation migration patterns of STEM doctoral recipients, in particular the likelihood these graduates will return to their home country. This volume also examines the role of the US higher education system and of US visa policy in attracting foreign students for graduate study and retaining them after graduation.

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North American deserts—lands of little water—have long been home to a surprising diversity of aquatic life, from fish to insects and mollusks. With European settlement, however, water extraction, resource exploitation, and invasive species set many of these native aquatic species on downward spirals. In this book, conservationists dedicated to these creatures document the history of their work, the techniques and philosophies that inform it, and the challenges and opportunities of the future. A precursor to this book, Battle Against Extinction, laid out the scope of the problem and related conservation activities through the late 1980s. Since then, many nascent conservation programs have matured, and researchers have developed new technologies, improved and refined methods, and greatly expanded our knowledge of the myriad influences on the ecology and dynamics of these species. Standing between Life and Extinction brings the story up to date. While the future for some species is more secure than thirty years ago, others are less fortunate. Calling attention not only to iconic species like the razorback sucker, Gila trout, and Devils Hole pupfish, but also to other fishes and obscure and fascinating invertebrates inhabiting intermittent aquatic habitats, this book explores the scientific, social, and political challenges of preserving these aquatic species and their habitats amid an increasingly charged political discourse and in desert regions characterized by a growing human population and rapidly changing climate.

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The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, US history and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.

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American social welfare policy has produced a health system with skyrocketing costs, a disability insurance program that consigns many otherwise productive people to lives of inactivity, and a welfare program that attracts wide criticism. Making Social Welfare Policy in America explains how this happened by examining the historical development of three key programs—Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, and Temporary Aid to Needy Families. Edward D. Berkowitz traces the developments that led to each program’s creation. Policy makers often find it difficult to dislodge a program’s administrative structure, even as political, economic, and cultural circumstances change. Faced with this situation, they therefore solve contemporary problems with outdated programs and must improvise politically acceptable solutions. The results vary according to the political popularity of the program and the changes in the conventional wisdom. Some programs, such as Social Security Disability Insurance, remain in place over time. Policy makers have added new parts to Medicare to reflect modern developments. Congress has abolished Aid to Families of Dependent Children and replaced with a new program intended to encourage work among adult welfare recipients raising young children. Written in an accessible style and using a minimum of academic jargon, this book illuminates how three of our most important social welfare programs have come into existence and how they have fared over time.

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Economic inequality is at a record high in the United States, but public demand for redistribution is not rising with it. Meghan Condon and Amber Wichowsky show that this paradox and other mysteries about class and US politics can be solved through a focus on social comparison. Powerful currents compete to propel attention up or down--toward the rich or the poor--pulling politics along in the wake. Through an astute blend of experiments, surveys, and descriptions people offer in their own words, The Economic Other reveals that when less-advantaged Americans compare with the rich, they become more accurate about their own status and want more from government. But American society is structured to prevent upward comparison. In an increasingly divided, anxious nation, opportunities to interact with the country's richest are shrinking, and people prefer to compare to those below to feel secure. Even when comparison with the rich does occur, many lose confidence in their power to effect change. Laying bare how social comparisons drive political attitudes, The Economic Other is an essential look at the stubborn plight of inequality and the measures needed to solve it.

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The rise of the Tea Party redefined both the Republican Party and how we think about intraparty conflict. What initially appeared to be an anti-Obama protest movement of fiscal conservatives matured into a faction that sought to increase its influence in the Republican Party by any means necessary. Tea Partiers captured the party’s organizational machinery and used it to replace established politicians with Tea Party–style Republicans, eventually laying the groundwork for the nomination and election of a candidate like Donald Trump. In How the Tea Party Captured the GOP, Rachel Marie Blum approaches the Tea Party from the angle of party politics, explaining the Tea Party’s insurgent strategies as those of a party faction. Blum offers a novel theory of factions as miniature parties within parties, discussing how fringe groups can use factions to increase their political influence in the US two-party system. In this richly researched book, the author uncovers how the electoral losses of 2008 sparked disgruntled Republicans to form the Tea Party faction, and the strategies the Tea Party used to wage a systematic takeover of the Republican Party. This book not only illuminates how the Tea Party achieved its influence, but also provides a framework for identifying other factional insurgencies.

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In the 14th century, a considerable number of men in Germany and Switzerland were executed for committing sodomy. In the 17th century, simply speaking of the act was cause for censorship. Here, in the first ever history of sodomy in these countries, Helmut Puff argues that accusations of sodomy in this era were actually crucial to the success of the Protestant Reformation. Drawing on both literary and historical evidence, Puff shows that speakers of German associated sodomy with Italy and, increasingly, the Catholic Church. As the Reformation gained momentum, the formerly unspeakable crime of sodomy gained a voice, as Martin Luther and others deployed accusations of sodomy to discredit the upper ranks of the Church and to create a sense of community among Protestant believers. During the 16th century, official reactions to this defamatory rhetoric, and fear that mere mention of sodomy would incite sinful acts, resulted in the suppression of court cases from public scrutiny. This eye-opening study should interest historians of gender, sexuality and religion, as well as scholars of mediaeval and early modern history and culture.

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In the seven and a half years before his collapse into madness, Nietzsche completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the best-selling and most widely read philosophical work of all time, as well as six additional works that are today considered required reading for Western intellectuals. Together, these works mark the final period of Nietzsche's thought, when he developed a new, more profound, and more systematic teaching rooted in the idea of the eternal recurrence, which he considered his deepest thought. Cutting against the grain of most current Nietzsche scholarship, Michael Allen Gillespie presents the thought of the late Nietzsche as Nietzsche himself intended, drawing not only on his published works but on the plans for the works he was unable to complete, which can be found throughout his notes and correspondence. Gillespie argues that the idea of the eternal recurrence transformed Nietzsche's thinking from 1881 to 1889. It provided both the basis for his rejection of traditional metaphysics and the grounding for the new logic, ontology, theology, and anthropology he intended to create with the aim of a fundamental transformation of European civilization, a "revaluation of all values." Nietzsche first broached the idea of the eternal recurrence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but its failure to gain attention or public acceptance led him to present the idea again through a series of works intended to culminate in a never-completed magnum opus. Nietzsche believed this idea would enable the redemption of humanity. At the same time, he recognized its terrifying, apocalyptic consequences, since it would also produce wars of unprecedented ferocity and destruction. Through his careful analysis, Gillespie reveals a more radical and more dangerous Nietzsche than the humanistic or democratic Nietzsche we commonly think of today, but also a Nietzsche who was deeply at odds with the Nietzsche imagined to be the forefather of Fascism. Gillespie's essays examine Nietzsche's final teaching--its components and its political, philosophical, and theological significance. The book concludes with a critical examination and a reflection on its meaning for us today.

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"Provine's thorough and thoroughly admirable examination of Wright's life and influence, which is accompanied by a very useful collection of Wright's papers on evolution, is the best we have for any recent figure in evolutionary biology."—Joe Felsenstein, Nature"In Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology . . . Provine has produced an intellectual biography which serves to chart in considerable detail both the life and work of one man and the history of evolutionary theory in the middle half of this century. Provine is admirably suited to his task. . . . The resulting book is clearly a labour of love which will be of great interest to those who have a mature interest in the history of evolutionary theory."-John Durant, ;ITimes Higher Education Supplement;X

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Milton Friedman is widely recognized as one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. Yet no previous study has distilled Friedman’s vast body of writings into an authoritative account of his research, his policy views, and his interventions in public debate. With this ambitious new work, Edward Nelson closes the gap: Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States is the defining narrative on the famed economist, the first to grapple comprehensively with Friedman’s research output, economic framework, and legacy. This two-volume account provides a foundational introduction to Friedman’s role in several major economic debates that took place in the United States between 1932 and 1972. The first volume, which takes the story through 1960, covers the period in which Friedman began and developed his research on monetary policy. It traces Friedman’s thinking from his professional beginnings in the 1930s as a combative young microeconomist, to his wartime years on the staff of the US Treasury, and his emergence in the postwar period as a leading proponent of monetary policy. The second volume covers the years between 1960 and 1972— years that saw the publication of Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States. The book also covers Friedman’s involvement in a number of debates in the 1960s and 1970s, on topics such as unemployment, inflation, consumer protection, and the environment. As a fellow monetary economist, Nelson writes from a unique vantage point, drawing on both his own expertise in monetary analysis and his deep familiarity with Friedman’s writings. Using extensive documentation, the book weaves together Friedman’s research contributions and his engagement in public debate, providing an unparalleled analysis of Friedman’s views on the economic developments of his day.

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A thought-provoking history of communications that challenges ideas about freedom of speech and democracy. At the heart of democracy lies a contradiction that cannot be resolved, one that has affected free societies since their advent: Though freedom of speech and media has always been a necessary condition of democracy, that very freedom is also its greatest threat. When new forms of communications arrive, they often bolster the practices of democratic politics. But the more accessible the media of a society, the more susceptible that society is to demagoguery, distraction, and spectacle. Tracing the history of media disruption and the various responses to it over time, Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing reveal how these changes have challenged democracy-often with unsettling effects. The Paradox of Democracy captures the deep connection between communication and political culture, from the ancient art of rhetoric and the revolutionary role of newspapers to liberal broadcast media and the toxic misinformation of the digital public sphere. With clear-eyed analysis, Gershberg and Illing show that our contemporary debates over media, populism, and cancel culture are not too different from democratic cultural experiences of the past. As we grapple with a fast-changing, hyper-digital world, they prove democracy is always perched precipitously on a razor's edge, now as ever before.

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Around the globe, democracy appears broken. With political and socioeconomic inequality on the rise, we are faced with the urgent question of how to better distribute power, opportunity, and wealth in diverse modern societies. This volume confronts the dilemma head-on, exploring new ways to combat current social hierarchies of domination. Using examples from the United States, India, Germany, and Cameroon, the contributors offer paradigm-changing approaches to the concepts of justice, identity, and social groups while also taking a fresh look at the idea that the demographic make-up of institutions should mirror the make-up of a populace as a whole. After laying out the conceptual framework, the volume turns to a number of provocative topics, among them the pernicious tenacity of implicit bias, the logical contradictions inherent to the idea of universal human dignity, and the paradoxes and problems surrounding affirmative action. A stimulating blend of empirical and interpretive analyses, Difference without Domination urges us to reconsider the idea of representation and to challenge what it means to measure equality and inequality.

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