Search results for ""Ideals""

Richard Moore Rive (1930–1989) was a writer, scholar, literary critic and college teacher in Cape Town, South Africa. He is best known for his short stories written in the late 1950s and for his second novel, ’Buckingham Palace‘, District Six, in which he depicted the well-known cosmopolitan area of District Six, where he grew up. In this biography Shaun Viljoen, a former colleague of Rive’s, creates the composite qualities of a man who was committed to the struggle against racial oppression and to the ideals of non-racialism but was also variously described as irascible, pompous and arrogant, with a ’cultivated urbanity‘. Beneath these public personae lurked a constant and troubled awareness of his dark skin colour and guardedness about his homosexuality. Using his own and others’ memories, and drawing on Rive’s fiction, Viljoen brings the author to life with sensitivity and empathy. The biography follows Rive from his early years in the 1950s, writing for Drum magazine and spending time in the company of great anti-establishment writers such as Jack Cope, Ingrid Jonker, Jan Rabie, Marjorie Wallace, Es’kia Mphahlele and Nadine Gordimer, to his acceptance at Magdalene College, Oxford, where he completed his doctorate on Olive Schreiner, before returning to South Africa to resume his position as senior lecturer at Hewat College of Education. This biography will resurface Richard Rive the man and the writer, and invite us to think anew about how we read writers who lived and worked during the years of apartheid.

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Honorable Mention, 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, given by the Modern Language Association Uncovers the queer logics of premodern religious and secular texts Putting premodern theology and poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics, Queer Faith reassess the commonplace view that a modern veneration of sexual monogamy and fidelity finds its roots in Protestant thought. What if this narrative of “history and tradition” suppresses the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith examines key works of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the affordances of promiscuity, both in its sexual sense and in its larger designation of all that is impure and disorderly. At the same time, Melissa E. Sanchez resists casting promiscuity as the ethical, queer alternative to monogamy, tracing instead how ideals of sexual liberation are themselves attached to nascent racial and economic hierarchies. Because discourses of fidelity and freedom are also discourses on racial and sexual positionality, excavating the complex historical entanglement of faith, race, and eroticism is urgent to contemporary queer debates about normativity, agency, and relationality. Deliberately unfaithful to disciplinary norms and national boundaries, this book assembles new conceptual frameworks at the juncture of secular and religious thought, political and aesthetic form. It thereby enlarges the contexts, objects, and authorized genealogies of queer scholarship. Retracing a history that did not have to be, Sanchez recovers writing that inscribes radical queer insights at the premodern foundations of conservative and heteronormative culture.

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An intimate account of Orthodox family planning amid shifting state policies in Israel In recent years, Israeli state policies have attempted to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families, an objective that flies in the face of traditional practices in their community. As state desires to cultivate a high-income, tech-centered nation come into greater conflict with common Orthodox familial practices, Jewish couples are finding it increasingly difficult to actualize their reproductive aims and communal expectations. In The State of Desire, Lea Taragin-Zeller provides an intimate examination of the often devastating effects of Israel’s steep cutbacks in child benefits, which are aimed at limiting the rapid increase in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. Taragin-Zeller takes the reader beyond Orthodox taboos, capturing how cracks in religious convictions engender a painful process of re-orientating desires to reproduce amidst shrinking public support, feminism, and new ideals of romance, intimacy and parenting. Paying close attention to ethical dilemmas, the book explores not just pro-ceptive but also contraceptive desires around family formation: when to have children, how many, and at what cost. The volume offers a rare look at issues of contraception in the Orthodox context, and notably includes interviews with men, making the case that we cannot continue to study reproductive choice solely through the perspectives of women. The State of Desire is a groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of religion and reproduction, and a remarkably intimate account of the delicate balance between personal desires and those of the state.

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An intimate account of Orthodox family planning amid shifting state policies in Israel In recent years, Israeli state policies have attempted to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families, an objective that flies in the face of traditional practices in their community. As state desires to cultivate a high-income, tech-centered nation come into greater conflict with common Orthodox familial practices, Jewish couples are finding it increasingly difficult to actualize their reproductive aims and communal expectations. In The State of Desire, Lea Taragin-Zeller provides an intimate examination of the often devastating effects of Israel’s steep cutbacks in child benefits, which are aimed at limiting the rapid increase in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. Taragin-Zeller takes the reader beyond Orthodox taboos, capturing how cracks in religious convictions engender a painful process of re-orientating desires to reproduce amidst shrinking public support, feminism, and new ideals of romance, intimacy and parenting. Paying close attention to ethical dilemmas, the book explores not just pro-ceptive but also contraceptive desires around family formation: when to have children, how many, and at what cost. The volume offers a rare look at issues of contraception in the Orthodox context, and notably includes interviews with men, making the case that we cannot continue to study reproductive choice solely through the perspectives of women. The State of Desire is a groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of religion and reproduction, and a remarkably intimate account of the delicate balance between personal desires and those of the state.

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How online affinity networks expand learning and opportunity for young people Boyband One Direction fanfiction writers, gamers who solve math problems together, Harry Potter fans who knit for a cause. Across subcultures and geographies, young fans have found each other and formed community online, learning from one another along the way. From these and other in-depth case studies of online affinity networks, Affinity Online considers how young people have found new opportunities for expanded learning in the digital age. These cases reveal the shared characteristics and unique cultures and practices of different online affinity networks, and how they support “connected learning”—learning that brings together youth interests, social activity, and accomplishment in civic, academic, and career relevant arenas. Although involvement in online communities is an established fixture of growing up in the networked age, participation in these spaces show how young people are actively taking up new media for their own engaged learning and social development. While providing a wealth of positive examples for how the online world provides new opportunities for learning, the book also examines the ways in which these communities still reproduce inequalities based on gender, race, and socioeconomic status. The book concludes with a set of concrete suggestions for how the positive learning opportunities offered by online communities could be made available to more young people, at school and at home. Affinity Online explores how online practices and networks bridge the divide between in-school and out-of-school learning, finding that online affinity networks are creating new spaces of opportunity for realizing the ideals of connected learning.

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The presence of the orthopedically impaired body in art is so pervasive that, paradoxically, it has failed to attract the attention of most art historians. In Picturing the Lame in Italian Art from Antiquity to the Modern Era, Livio Pestilli investigates the changing meaning that images of individuals with limited mobility acquired through the centuries. This study evinces that in distinct opposition to the practice of classical artists, who manifested a lack of interest in the subject of lameness since it was considered 'a defect or a deformity' and deformity a 'want of measure, which is always unsightly,' their Early Christian counterparts depicted them profusely, because images of the miraculous healing of the lame became the reassuring sign of universal acceptance and the promise of a more equitable existence in this life or the next. In the Middle Ages, instead, when voluntary poverty came to be associated with the necessary condition of faithfulness to Christ, the indigent lame, along with others who were forced to beg for a living, became the image of the alter Christus. This view was to change in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, when, with the resurgence of classical and Pauline ideals that condemned the idle, representations of the orthopedically impaired became associated with swindlers, freeloaders and parasites. This fascinating story came basically to an end in the Eighteenth century when, with the revival of the Greek ideal of the Beautiful, the lame gradually left center stage to be relegated again to the margins of the visual arts.

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Although the radical populist movement that arose in Russia during the reign of Tsar Alexander II has been well documented, this important study opens with questions that haven't yet been addressed: How did Russian radical populists manage to carry out a three-year campaign of revolutionary violence, killing or wounding scores of people, including top government officials, and eventually taking the life of the tsar himself? And how did this all occur under the noses of the tsar's political police, who deployed vast resources and huge numbers of officials in an exhaustive effort to stop the killing? In Underground Petersburg, Christopher Ely argues that the most powerful weapon of populist terrorism was the revolutionary underground it created. Attempts to convey populist ideals in the public sphere met with resistance at every turn. When methods such as propaganda campaigns and street demonstrations failed, populists created a sophisticated urban underground. Linked to the newly discovered weapon of terrorist violence, this base of operations allowed them to live undetected in the midst of the city, produce their own weaponry, and attempt to ignite an insurrection through violent attacks—putting terrorism on the map as a technique of political rebellion. Accessible to non-specialists, this insightful study reinterprets radical populism, clarifying its crucial place in Russian history and elucidating its contribution to the history of terrorism. Underground Petersburg will appeal to scholars and students of Russia, as well as those interested in terrorism and insurrectionary movements, urban studies, and the sociology of subcultures.

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The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. Rejecting a singular theory of improvisational agency, the contributors show how improvisation helps people gain hard-won and highly contingent agency. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance, improvisation's ability to disrupt power relations, Pauline Oliveros's ideas about listening, flautist Nicole Mitchell's compositions based on Octavia Butler's science fiction, and an interview with Judith Butler about the relationship between her work and improvisation. The contributors' close attention to improvisation provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities and offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies. Contributors. George Blake, David Borgo, Judith Butler, Rebecca Caines, Louise Campbell, Illa Carrillo Rodríguez, Berenice Corti, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Nina Eidsheim, Tomie Hahn, Jaclyn Heyen, Christine Sun Kim, Catherine Lee, Andra McCartney, Tracy McMullen, Kevin McNeilly, Leaf Miller, Jovana Milovic, François Mouillot, Pauline Oliveros, Jason Robinson, Neil Rolnick, Simon Rose, Gillian Siddall, Julie Dawn Smith, Jesse Stewart, Clara Tomaz, Sherrie Tucker, Lindsay Vogt, Zachary Wallmark, Ellen Waterman, David Whalen, Pete Williams, Deborah Wong, Mandy-Suzanne Wong

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Inquiring into the future of the university, Susan Giroux finds a paradox at the heart of higher education in the post-civil rights era. Although we think of "post-civil rights" as representing a colorblind or race transcendent triumphalism in national political discourse, Giroux argues that our present is shaped by persistent "raceless" racism at home and permanent civilizational war abroad. She sees the university as a primary battleground in this ongoing struggle. As the heir to Enlightenment ideals of civic education, the university should be the institution for the production of an informed and reflective democratic citizenry responsible to and for the civic health of the polity, a privileged site committed to free and equal exchange in the interests of peaceful and democratic coexistence. And yet, says Giroux, historically and currently the university has failed and continues to fail in this role. Between Race and Reason engages the work of diverse intellectuals—Friedrich Nietzsche, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jacques Derrida and others—who challenge the university's past and present collusion with racism and violence. The book complements recent work done on the politics of higher education that has examined the consequences of university corporatization, militarization, and bureaucratic rationalization by focusing on the ways in which these elements of a broader neoliberal project are also racially prompted and promoted. At the same time, it undertakes to imagine how the university can be reconceived as a uniquely privileged site for critique in the interests of today's urgent imperatives for peace and justice.

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Published at a point when American filmmakers are deeply involved in the War on Terror, this authoritative and timely book offers the first comprehensive account of Hollywood's propaganda role during the defining ideological conflict of the twentieth century: the Cold War. In an analysis of films dating from America's first Red Scare in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Tony Shaw examines the complex relationship between filmmakers, censors, politicians and government propagandists. Movies were at the centre of the Cold War's battle for hearts and minds. Hollywood's comedies, love stories, musicals, thrillers, documentaries and science fiction shockers -- to list a few genres -- played a critical dual role: on the one hand teaching millions of Americans why communism represented the greatest threat their country had ever faced, and on the other selling America's liberal-capitalist ideals across the globe. Drawing on declassified government documents, studio archives and filmmakers' private papers, Shaw reveals the different ways in which cinematic propaganda was produced, disseminated, and received by audiences during the Cold War. In the process, he blends subjects as diverse as women's fashions, McCarthyism, drug smuggling, Christianity, and American cultural diplomacy in India. His conclusions about Hollywood's versatility and power have a contemporary resonance which will interest anyone wishing to understand wartime propaganda today. Key features: * The first comprehensive account of Hollywood's role during the Cold War. *A new interrogation of the collaboration between filmmakers and government in the production of propaganda. *The use of primary documentation and new archival research make this book unique.

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Journalists are commonly denounced from all sides – a shameful, deceitful trade, a profession sold out to the powerful which gives a biased and misleading picture of the world. Behind the condemnation one can often detect a desire for reform, a feeling that good journalism is too important for the health of democracy to be left to languish among the tabloids. Yet the discussion rarely gets beyond the well-worn formulas of free speech and the Fourth Estate. The question of the political significance of journalism is never seriously addressed, and the question of what journalism should be is rarely posed. This important new book by Géraldine Muhlmann addresses these gaps in our understanding and goes a long way to filling them. Putting aside the hasty diatribes against journalism, Muhlmann asks the fundamental questions: what should journalism be? What ideals should it serve? What do seeing and showing the world mean today? What direction should journalism take in order to emerge from its current crisis? Drawing on a rich tradition of philosophical thought, Muhlmann breathes new life into the old debate about journalism and its role today. Avoiding the twin pitfalls of destructive criticism and naive celebration, she sees a double task for a reinvigorated journalism: to allow space for conflict but also to foster unity within the political community. In the practice of journalism we see the enigma of democracy itself: the coexistence of two stages, one of action and one of representations, the latter offering a symbolic resolution to the conflicts that animate the former.

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A compelling account of South Africa’s post-Apartheid democracyAt a time when many democracies are under strain around the world, Until We Have Won Our Liberty shines new light on the signal achievements of one of the contemporary era’s most closely watched transitions away from minority rule. South Africa’s democratic development has been messy, fiercely contested, and sometimes violent. But as Evan Lieberman argues, it has also offered a voice to the voiceless, unprecedented levels of government accountability, and tangible improvements in quality of life.Lieberman opens with a first-hand account of the hard-fought 2019 national election, and how it played out in Mogale City, a post-Apartheid municipality created from Black African townships and White Afrikaner suburbs. From this launching point, he examines the complexities of South Africa’s multiracial society and the unprecedented democratic experiment that began with the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. While acknowledging the enormous challenges many South Africans continue to face—including unemployment, inequality, and discrimination—Lieberman draws on the country’s history and the experience of comparable countries to demonstrate that elected Black-led governments have, without resorting to political extremism, improved the lives of millions. In the context of open and competitive politics, citizens have gained access to housing, basic services, and dignified treatment to a greater extent than during any prior period.Countering much of the conventional wisdom about contemporary South Africa, Until We Have Won Our Liberty offers hope for the enduring impact of democratic ideals.

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It is clear that in our society today, issues of diversity and social connectedness remain deeply unresolved and can lead to crisis and instability. The major demographic changes taking place in America make discussions about such issues all the more imperative. Our Compelling Interests engages this conversation and demonstrates that diversity is an essential strength that gives nations a competitive edge. This inaugural volume of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Our Compelling Interests series illustrates that a diverse population offers our communities a prescription for thriving now and in the future. This landmark essay collection begins with a powerful introduction situating the demographic transitions reshaping American life, and the contributors present a broad-ranging look at the value of diversity to democracy and civil society. They explore the paradoxes of diversity and inequality in the fifty years following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, and they review the ideals that have governed our thinking about social cohesion--such as assimilation, integration, and multiculturalism--before delving into the new ideal of social connectedness. The book also examines the demographics of the American labor force and its implications for college enrollment, graduation, the ability to secure a job, business outcomes, and the economy. Contributors include Danielle Allen, Nancy Cantor, Anthony Carnevale, William Frey, Earl Lewis, Nicole Smith, Thomas Sugrue, and Marta Tienda. Commentary is provided by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Patricia Gurin, Ira Katznelson, and Marta Tienda. At a time when American society is swiftly being transformed, Our Compelling Interests sheds light on how our differences will only become more critical to our collective success.

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In the post-9/11 West, there is no shortage of strident voices telling us that Islam is a threat to the security, values, way of life, and even existence of the United States and Europe. For better or worse, "the Muslim question" has become the great question of our time. It is a question bound up with others--about freedom of speech, terror, violence, human rights, women's dress, and sexuality. Above all, it is tied to the possibility of democracy. In this fearless, original, and surprising book, Anne Norton demolishes the notion that there is a "clash of civilizations" between the West and Islam. What is really in question, she argues, is the West's commitment to its own ideals: to democracy and the Enlightenment trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the most fundamental sense, the Muslim question is about the values not of Islamic, but of Western, civilization. Moving between the United States and Europe, Norton provides a fresh perspective on iconic controversies, from the Danish cartoon of Muhammad to the murder of Theo van Gogh. She examines the arguments of a wide range of thinkers--from John Rawls to Slavoj Zizek. And she describes vivid everyday examples of ordinary Muslims and non-Muslims who have accepted each other and built a common life together. Ultimately, Norton provides a new vision of a richer and more diverse democratic life in the West, one that makes room for Muslims rather than scapegoating them for the West's own anxieties.

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When Louis XVI presented Benjamin Franklin with a snuff box encrusted with diamonds and inset with the King’s portrait, the gift troubled Americans: it threatened to “corrupt” Franklin by clouding his judgment or altering his attitude toward the French in subtle psychological ways. This broad understanding of political corruption—rooted in ideals of civic virtue—was a driving force at the Constitutional Convention.For two centuries the framers’ ideas about corruption flourished in the courts, even in the absence of clear rules governing voters, civil officers, and elected officials. Should a law that was passed by a state legislature be overturned because half of its members were bribed? What kinds of lobbying activity were corrupt, and what kinds were legal? When does an implicit promise count as bribery? In the 1970s the U.S. Supreme Court began to narrow the definition of corruption, and the meaning has since changed dramatically. No case makes that clearer than Citizens United.In 2010, one of the most consequential Court decisions in American political history gave wealthy corporations the right to spend unlimited money to influence elections. Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion treated corruption as nothing more than explicit bribery, a narrow conception later echoed by Chief Justice Roberts in deciding McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014. With unlimited spending transforming American politics for the worse, warns Zephyr Teachout, Citizens United and McCutcheon were not just bad law but bad history. If the American experiment in self-government is to have a future, then we must revive the traditional meaning of corruption and embrace an old ideal.

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Religion has been on the rise in America for decades—which strikes many as a shocking new development. To the contrary, Jason Stevens asserts, the rumors of the death of God were premature. Americans have always conducted their cultural life through religious symbols, never more so than during the Cold War. In God-Fearing and Free, Stevens discloses how the nation, on top of the world and torn between grandiose self-congratulation and doubt about the future, opened the way for a new master narrative. The book shows how the American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country’s mythical innocence and fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism.Stevens reveals how the Augustinian doctrine of original sin was refurbished and then mobilized in a variety of cultural discourses that aimed to shore up democratic society against threats preying on the nation’s internal weaknesses. Suddenly, innocence no longer meant a clear conscience. Instead it became synonymous with totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right or the communist left, whose notions of perfectability were dangerously close to millenarian ideals at the heart of American Protestant tradition. As America became riddled with self-doubt, ruminations on the meaning of power and the future of the globe during the “American Century” renewed the impetus to religion.Covering a wide selection of narrative and cultural forms, Stevens shows how writers, artists, and intellectuals, the devout as well as the nonreligious, disseminated the terms of this cultural dialogue, disputing, refining, and challenging it—effectively making the conservative case against modernity as liberals floundered.

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The Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author's personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century's experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements--people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, Francois Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.

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The perils of equating notions of freedom with artistic vitality Eloquently extolled by President John F. Kennedy, the idea that only artists in free societies can produce great art became a bedrock assumption of the Cold War. That this conviction defied centuries of historical evidence--to say nothing of achievements within the Soviet Union--failed to impact impregnable cultural Cold War doctrine. Joseph Horowitz writes: “That so many fine minds could have cheapened freedom by over-praising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War.” He shows how the efforts of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom were distorted by an anti-totalitarian “psychology of exile” traceable to its secretary general, the displaced Russian aristocrat/composer Nicolas Nabokov, and to Nabokov’s hero Igor Stravinsky. In counterpoint, Horowitz investigates personal, social, and political factors that actually shape the creative act. He here focuses on Stravinsky, who in Los Angeles experienced a “freedom not to matter,” and Dmitri Shostakovich, who was both victim and beneficiary of Soviet cultural policies. He also takes a fresh look at cultural exchange and explores paradoxical similarities and differences framing the popularization of classical music in the Soviet Union and the United States. In closing, he assesses the Kennedy administration’s arts advocacy initiatives and their pertinence to today’s fraught American national identity. Challenging long-entrenched myths, The Propaganda of Freedom newly explores the tangled relationship between the ideology of freedom and ideals of cultural achievement.

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For seven days in April 1968, students occupied five buildings on the campus of Columbia University to protest a planned gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, links between the university and the Vietnam War, and what they saw as the university’s unresponsive attitude toward their concerns. Exhilarating to some and deeply troubling to others, the student protests paralyzed the university, grabbed the world’s attention, and inspired other uprisings. Fifty years after the events, A Time to Stir captures the reflections of those who participated in and witnessed the Columbia rebellion.With more than sixty essays from members of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the Students’ Afro-American Society, faculty, undergraduates who opposed the protests, “outside agitators,” and members of the New York Police Department, A Time to Stir sheds light on the politics, passions, and ideals of the 1960s. Moving beyond accounts from the student movement’s white leadership, this book presents the perspectives of black students, who were grappling with their uneasy integration into a supposedly liberal campus, as well as the views of women, who began to question their second-class status within the protest movement and society at large. A Time to Stir also speaks to the complicated legacy of the uprising. For many, the events at Columbia inspired a lifelong dedication to social causes, while for others they signaled the beginning of the chaos that would soon engulf the left. Taken together, these reflections present a nuanced and moving portrait that reflects the sense of possibility and excess that characterized the 1960s.

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At once brave and athletic, virtuous and modest, female martyrs in the second and third centuries were depicted as self-possessed gladiators who at the same time exhibited the quintessentially "womanly" qualities of modesty, fertility, and beauty. L. Stephanie Cobb explores the double embodiment of "male" and "female" gender ideals in these figures, connecting them to Greco-Roman virtues and the construction of Christian group identities. Both male and female martyrs conducted their battles in the amphitheater, a masculine environment that enabled the divine combatants to showcase their strength, virility, and volition. These Christian martyr accounts also illustrated masculinity through the language of justice, resistance to persuasion, and-more subtly but most effectively-the juxtaposition of "unmanly" individuals (usually slaves, the old, or the young) with those at the height of male maturity and accomplishment (such as the governor or the proconsul). Imbuing female martyrs with the same strengths as their male counterparts served a vital function in Christian communities. Faced with the possibility of persecution, Christians sought to inspire both men and women to be braver than pagan and Jewish men. Yet within the community itself, traditional gender roles had to be maintained, and despite the call to be manly, Christian women were expected to remain womanly in relation to the men of their faith. Complicating our understanding of the social freedoms enjoyed by early Christian women, Cobb's investigation reveals the dual function of gendered language in martyr texts and its importance in laying claim to social power.

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In the thirteenth century, Paris was the largest city in Western Europe, the royal capital of France, and the seat of one of Europe's most important universities. In this vibrant and cosmopolitan city, the beguines, women who wished to devote their lives to Christian ideals without taking formal vows, enjoyed a level of patronage and esteem that was uncommon among like communities elsewhere. Some Parisian beguines owned shops and played a vital role in the city's textile industry and economy. French royals and nobles financially supported the beguinages, and university clerics looked to the beguines for inspiration in their pedagogical endeavors. The Beguines of Medieval Paris examines these religious communities and their direct participation in the city's commercial, intellectual, and religious life. Drawing on an array of sources, including sermons, religious literature, tax rolls, and royal account books, Tanya Stabler Miller contextualizes the history of Parisian beguines within a spectrum of lay religious activity and theological controversy. She examines the impact of women on the construction of medieval clerical identity, the valuation of women's voices and activities, and the surprising ways in which local networks and legal structures permitted women to continue to identify as beguines long after a church council prohibited the beguine status. Based on intensive archival research, The Beguines of Medieval Paris makes an original contribution to the history of female religiosity and labor, university politics and intellectual debates, royal piety, and the central place of Paris in the commerce and culture of medieval Europe.

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-----; 'Hope is the alchemy that turns a life around, and Bernadette’s Russell’s delightful and informative book gives us the toolkit to ignite hope in each of us.' - Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass; Whether we're grieving or afraid, worn down by everyday troubles or relentless bad news, there is always hope. As an expert on the multiple benefits of hope and kindness, Bernadette Russell reveals how hope can be nurtured by all of us, even in uncertain times.; Filled with cutting-edge research, timeless philosophy and tales of triumph over adversity, this uplifting and essential toolkit will give you all you need to cultivate hope in yourself, your community and in our future.; With plenty of 'try this' tips and case studies of everyday 'hope heroes', How to Be Hopeful will inspire you to live and to act with renewed hope for a more compassionate world.; Hope is the fuel that transforms our lives.; -----; 'The perfect book for troubling times. The ideas and exercises in How To Be Hopeful will soothe your soul.' - Katherine May, author of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times; 'Everyone needs to read this book.' - Dr Mark Williamson, director of ACTION FOR HAPPINESS; 'Bernadette reminds us of our values and ideals and that each of us has power to affect change.' - Vera Chok, co-author of The Good Immigrant; 'Exactly what is needed right now. Hope AND action.' - Stella Duffy O.B.E, author and co-founder of Fun Palaces campaign for cultural democracy

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In Seven Samurai (1954) a whole society is on the verge of irrevocable change. Akira Kurosawa’s celebrated film, regarded by many to be the major achievement of Japanese cinema, is an epic that evokes the cultural upheaval brought on by the collapse of Japanese militarism in the 16th century, but at the same time echoes also the sweeping cultural changes occurring in the aftermath of the American Occupation that followed Japan's defeat in the Second World War. The plot is deceptively simple. A village of farmers is beleaguered by a horde of bandits. In desperation, the farmers decide to hire itinerant samurai to protect their crops and people and defeat the bandits. There had never been a Japanese film in which peasants hired samurai, or an evocation of the social transformation that made such an idea credible. There are six samurai and one who is accepted as such. Together they reflect the ideals and values of a noble class near the point of extinction. Seven Samurai may be the greatest action film, a technical masterpiece unmatched in its depiction of movement and violence, but running beneath the sound and fury is a lament for a lost nobility, ‘a dirge for the spirit of Japan,’ writes Joan Mellen, ‘which will never again be so strong.’ Mellen's study contextualises Seven Samurai, marking its place in Japanese cinema and in Kurosawa’s film-making career. She explores the film’s roots in medieval history and, above all, the astonishing visual language in which Kurosawa created his elegiac epic.

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In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment. The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth’s shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change. This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.

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This guide takes you on a tour of the “home of the brick,” the official LEGO® House, so you can experience it for yourself at home! With photos, interviews, essays, and art from the LEGO archives, The Secrets of LEGO House explores the visual wonders and the themed “zones”—yellow for emotions, blue for problem solving, green for social interaction, and red for creativity—within the iconic LEGO House in Billund, Denmark. The Secrets of LEGO House offers an insider’s look at the creative philosophy behind the iconic brand. On each page, discover the true “secret” hidden among the 25 million LEGO bricks—that everything in the house is purposefully designed around nine core principles of learning through play. A joy for those who aren’t able to visit in person, and just as exciting for those who have, The Secrets of LEGO House is a bright, colorful celebration of the endless experiences possible with LEGO bricks. • EXCLUSIVE CONTENT: This book is a perfect gift or self-purchase for avid collectors and super fans seeking new, never-before-published content. • BROAD APPEAL: This book is not only perfect for longtime LEGO collectors, but also a broader audience of fans looking to explore the history of the toy they know and love. • BELOVED BRAND: For decades, the LEGO brand has inspired billions of people to stretch the limits of their imaginations. This book captures the creativity and joy at the heart of the LEGO brand, taking readers behind the scenes to reveal the brand’s core ethos and ideals.

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Revered by some as the Arab Garibaldi, maligned by others as an intriguer and opportunist, Fawzi al-Qawuqji manned the ramparts of Arab history for four decades. As a young officer in the Ottoman Army, he fought the British in World War I and won an Iron Cross. In the 1920s, he mastered the art of insurgency and helped lead a massive uprising against the French authorities in Syria. A decade later, he reappeared in Palestine, where he helped direct the Arab Revolt of 1936. When an effort to overthrow the British rulers of Iraq failed, he moved to Germany, where he spent much of World War II battling his fellow exile, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had accused him of being a British spy. In 1947, Qawuqji made a daring escape from Allied-occupied Berlin, and sought once again to shape his region's history. In his most famous role, he would command the Arab Liberation Army in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. In this well-crafted, definitive biography, Laila Parsons tells Qawuqji's dramatic story and sets it in the full context of his turbulent times. Following Israel's decisive victory, Qawuqji was widely faulted as a poor leader with possibly dubious motives.The Commander shows us that the truth was more complex: although he doubtless made some strategic mistakes, he never gave up fighting for Arab independence and unity, even as those ideals were undermined by powers inside and outside the Arab world. In Qawuqji's life story we find the origins of today's turmoil in the Arab Middle East.

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The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

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The preeminent lyric poet of ancient Greece.Of the Greek lyric poets, Pindar (ca. 518–438 BC) was “by far the greatest for the magnificence of his inspiration” in Quintilian’s view; Horace judged him “sure to win Apollo’s laurels.” The esteem of the ancients may help explain why a good portion of his work was carefully preserved. Most of the Greek lyric poets come down to us only in bits and pieces, but nearly a quarter of Pindar’s poems survive complete. William H. Race now brings us, in two volumes, a new edition and translation of the four books of victory odes, along with surviving fragments of Pindar’s other poems.Like Simonides and Bacchylides, Pindar wrote elaborate odes in honor of prize-winning athletes for public performance by singers, dancers, and musicians. His forty-five victory odes celebrate triumphs in athletic contests at the four great Panhellenic festivals: the Olympic, Pythian (at Delphi), Nemean, and Isthmian games. In these complex poems, Pindar commemorates the achievement of athletes and powerful rulers against the backdrop of divine favor, human failure, heroic legend, and the moral ideals of aristocratic Greek society. Readers have long savored them for their rich poetic language and imagery, moral maxims, and vivid portrayals of sacred myths.Race provides brief introductions to each ode and full explanatory footnotes, offering the reader invaluable guidance to these often difficult poems. His Loeb Pindar also contains a helpfully annotated edition and translation of significant fragments, including hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, maiden songs, and dirges.

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'LaBute takes us to shadowy places we don't like to talk about, sometimes even to think about.' NewsdayObsession with surface and secrets runs through this second collection of Neil LaBute's work. The Shape of Things peels back the skin of modern-day relationships to ask how far someone might change themselves for love, or for art. In Fat Pig, a man confronts his friends' - and his own - fixation with Hollywood ideals of beauty when he falls for a 'plus size' young woman. In a Dark Dark House and In a Forest, Dark and Deep are twin tales of sibling conflict. In the first, estranged brothers must reconcile conflicting memories, after one asks for corroboration of childhood abuse. In the second, a man's offer to help his sister clear out her cottage brings a terrible confession into the light.The Shape of Things'What initially seems a touching study of student romance develops instead into a passionate discussion about the way art feeds on life.' Daily TelegraphFat Pig'As large as Helen is, the tender heart of the play is easily twice as big.' VarietyIn a Dark Dark House'LaBute toys with expectations and takes pleasure in our discomfort... The play does lead to a pretty dark place - but the ending is not without hope.' Daily MailIn a Forest, Dark and Deep 'It is billed as being about sibling rivalry, but in fact majors on far deeper, dangerous things: the yearning to be understood, female manipulation, and fascinated male disgust at a sister's lurid sexuality.' The Times

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One year into the task of putting University London Central back on its feet, trouble-shooting Vice-Chancellor Professor Clifford Conquest is battling those who, ‘in dribs and drabs, defraud my students of the education they deserve’. His political star is in the ascendant and the ambition to be an important figure of the Centre Left in a reformed Labour party comes closer. But no! His aim is threatened by the forces of the Rising Left – not least on his governing body – bent on displacing the Centre Left. Both factions regard universities as their intellectual stronghold in danger of becoming a plaything of the Right. When a magnetic couple from the world of cinema attend Graduation Day, Conquest’s ambitions for The New University are given renewed impetus. Complications are rife. A student comes to a sticky end, raising questions about the university’s ability to assess risk. A literary endowment causes strife. The value of arcane research fields is called into question and professors revolt. Can Conquest fight off the doctrinaire forces of the Rising Left determined to derail his ambitions? Like any Public Sector samurai, he dons a fresh suit and takes the fight to his enemies. Will Higher Education be reborn? Can he out-connive the connivers? Do the polemical hardliners out-fox him? Even in his darkest hour there are glimpses of stardust; ideals to guide him onwards. For one driven by the highest motives success is truly glorious, even if threatened by the occasional fumble!

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Cities are possibly the most dynamic and important administrative units today. Cities play big roles in addressing many of the complex challenges the world is facing today, including climate change, public health, and migration. This places pressure on public administration and the public sector, to do more with less, particularly at the local level where government services have the most direct impact on people's everyday lives as well as paradigmatic societal shifts associated with the rise of platform economies and new consumption patterns which transform public service delivery whilst changing public expectations. Co-creation and Smart Cities: Looking Beyond Technology highlights ways to meet these new demands with a more robust value-based perspective on public service development and delivery, specifically via co-creation. Co-creation is a way to plan, execute and evaluate public service design and delivery for contemporary cities, a valid means to support the ‘balancing act’ of promoting efficient and cost-effective governance. Built on insights gained through years of experience with and research on co-creation, as well as testimonials from practitioners, this volume presents collaborative and innovative solutions associated with smart city ideals, while continuing to develop a citizen-centric focus that is sustainable over time. Co-creation and Smart Cities helps structure co-creation processes that foster responsible innovation and a systemic, value-based approach to sustainable urban development. This title will be of interest to government officials, researchers and bottom-up communities looking to implement methods for co-creation within cities.

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THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK - SOON TO BE A MAJOR NETFLIX PRODUCTION'You'll devour Northern Spy . . . I loved this thrill ride of a book'Reese Witherspoon'A sharp, moving thriller: you lose your breath for adrenalin'Abigail Dean, author of Girl A'A chilling, gorgeously written tale'New York Times'Nerve-shredding suspense'Daily Mail'Thrillingly good... Flynn Berry shows a le Carré-like flair for making you wonder what's really going on at any given moment'Washington Post A producer at the Belfast bureau of the BBC, Tessa is at work one day when the news of another IRA raid comes on the air: as the anchor requests the public's help in locating those responsible for this latest attack - a robbery at a gas station - Tessa's sister Marian appears on the screen, pulling a black mask over her face.The police believe Marian has joined the IRA, but Tessa knows this is impossible. But when the truth of what has happened to her sister reveals itself, Tessa will be forced to choose: between her ideals and her family. Praise for Flynn Berry'Breathtaking . . . Berry writes thrillingly'New York Times'Beautifully paced and satisfyingly ominous'Guardian'Mesmerizingly effective'The Times 'A thrilling page-turner'Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train'Berry's clever, thrilling writing wound me in and left me heartbroken'Fiona Barton, author of The Widow'What a book! A skillful and compelling exploration of families, crime, and class'Clare Mackintosh, author of I Let You Go

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Shortlisted for the CSA Millia Davenport Publication Award, 2021 Listed as one of The Five Most Essential Books about Art and Fashion, ArtNews, 2023 Dress and fashion are central to our understanding of art. From the stylization of the body to subtle textile embellishments and richly symbolic colors, dress tells a story and provides clues as to the cultural beliefs of the time in which artworks were produced. This concise and accessible book provides a step-by-step guide to analysing dress in art, including paintings, photographs, drawings and art installations. The first section of the book includes an introduction to visual analysis and explains how to ‘read’ fashion and dress in an artwork using the checklists. The second section offers case studies which demonstrate how artworks can be analysed from the point of view of key themes including status and identity, modernity, ideals of beauty, gender, race, globalization and politics. The book includes iconic as well as lesser known works of art, including work by Elisabeth Vigée le Brun, Thomas Gainsborough, James Jacques Tissot, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, Kent Monkman and many others. Reading Fashion in Art is the perfect text for students of fashion coming to art history for the first time as well as art history students studying dress in art and will be an essential handbook for any gallery visitor. The step-by-step methodology helps the reader learn to look at any work of art that includes the dressed or undressed body and confidently develop a critical analysis of what they see.

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Scientific Testimony concerns the roles of scientific testimony in science and society. The book develops a positive alternative to a tradition famously expressed by the slogan of the Royal Society Nullius in verba ("Take nobody's word for it"). This book argues that intra-scientific testimony--i.e., testimony between collaborating scientists--is not in conflict with the spirit of science or an add-on to scientific practice. On the contrary, intra-scientific testimony is a vital part of science. This is illustrated by articulating epistemic norms of intra-scientific testimony and arguing that they are vital to scientific methodology on a par with other scientific norms governing scientific observation and data analysis. The book also provides an account of public scientific testimony--i.e., scientific testimony to the lay population. This is done by integrating philosophical resources with empirical research on the science of science communication. For example, various misconceptions about science and folk epistemological biases are diagnosed as factors that contribute to science skepticism. This diagnosis provides the basis for developing novel norms for science communication that are sensitive to the psychological and social obstacles to laypersons' uptake of it. Finally, the volume discusses how public scientific testimony is best embedded in society and argues that it is critical for societies that pursue the ideals of deliberative democracy. Scientific Testimony draws on philosophy of science, social epistemology, and empirical research to provide a wide-ranging account of the roles of scientific testimony within scientific practice and within the wider society.

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Jean-Paul Sartre's first published novel, Nausea is both an extended essay on existentialist ideals, and a profound fictional exploration of a man struggling to restore a sense of meaning to his life. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated from the French by Robert Baldick with an introduction by James Wood.Nausea is both the story of the troubled life of an introspective historian, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times - existentialism. The book chronicles his struggle with the realisation that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning; a world in which he must find his own purpose and then take total responsibility for his choices. A seminal work of contemporary literary philosophy, Nausea evokes and examines the dizzying angst that can come from simply trying to live.Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was an iconoclastic French philosopher, novelist, playwright and, widely regarded as the central figure in post-war European culture and political thinking. Sartre famously refused the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 on the grounds that 'a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution'. His most well-known works, all of which are published by Penguin, include The Age of Reason, Nausea and Iron in the Soul.If you enjoyed Nausea, you might like Albert Camus' The Outsider, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'One of the very few successful members of the genre "Philosophical Novel" ... a young man's tour de force'Iris Murdoch

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At more than 120 bpm, electronic music sets the tempo on dancefloors around the globe. Accompanying the exhibition Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers, this book offers an insight into the visual culture of electronic music, and how technology, design, art and fashion have contributed to its power. With its roots in Detroit and Chicago in the early 1980s, electronic dance music was popularised across Europe through underground rave parties. Its impact on contemporary culture is still unfolding today. Containing interviews with early pioneers such as techno legend Jeff Mills, The Designers Republic’s Ian Anderson, and those pushing the political dimension of electronic music, such as ballroom dancer and DJ Kiddy Smile, Electronic bears witness to the shifting nature of the genre. Illustrated with over 300 images, some published here for the first time, Electronic features Jean-Michel Jarre’s virtual studio; work by pioneer Daphne Oram of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; audiovisual performances by musicians like Bicep and the Chemical Brothers; fashion collections by Raf Simons and Charles Jeffrey of Loverboy; iconic photography by Jacob Khrist and Tina Paul; artwork by Christian Marclay; club graphics from Peter Saville and Mark Farrow; and iconic venues such as the Haçienda, Gatecrasher, Fabric, Berghain and the Warehouse Project. Reflecting the shifts in society over the past thirty years, electronic music has generated distinct visual languages as well as its own political and cultural ideals.

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A renowned orator and writer, Lincoln believed that he must speak plainly so that every American, regardless of their level of education or literacy, would understand the complicated issues affecting the country during his presidency. He overcame a very humble childhood to become our nation's sixteenth president and a trailblazer in the fight to abolish slavery. In addition to the accomplishments of his lifetime, it is Lincoln's simple but elegant words - in everything from the Emancipation Proclamation to compassionate and often humorous letters to family and friends - that are his legacy. They are proof of his unfailing dedication to the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice upon which America was founded. In this comprehensive collection of Lincoln's writings, historian Milton Meltzer provides a rare personal glimpse into the life of the man behind the legendary words. This handsome volume also features bold, dramatic linocuts by illustrator Stephen Alcorn. Includes author's and illustrator's notes, profiles of Lincoln's contemporaries, and a chronology of Lincoln's life. AGES: 12 and up AUTHOR: Milton Meltzer (1915-2009) was the author of 110 books, five of which were nominated for the National Book Award. With Langston Hughes, he coauthored A Pictorial History of African Americans, now in its sixth edition. He received the 2001 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his contribution to children's literature, the 1986 Jane Addams Peace Association Children's Book Award, and the 2000 Regina Medal.

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Copyright is everywhere. Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property. Someone owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table. At this very moment, battles are raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs, pop songs, cartoon characters, snapshots, and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties—making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws with colorful and often baffling rationales covering almost all products of human creativity. It wasn’t always so. Copyright has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printers’ control of books. But a handful of little-noticed changes in the late twentieth century brought about a new enclosure of the cultural commons, concentrating ownership of immaterial goods in very few hands. Copyright’s metastasis can’t be understood without knowing its backstory, a long tangle of high ideals, low greed, opportunism, and word-mangling that allowed poems and novels (and now, even ringtones and databases) to be treated as if they were no different from farms and houses. Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, countless revisions have made copyright ever stronger. Who Owns This Sentence? is an often-humorous and always-enlightening cultural, legal, and global history of the idea that intangible things can be owned, and makes a persuasive case for seeing copyright as an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.

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News stories remind us almost daily that anti-American opinion is rampant in every corner of the globe. Journalists, scholars, and politicians alike reinforce the perception that anti-Americanism is an entrenched sentiment in many foreign countries. Political scientist Giacomo Chiozza challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that foreign public opinion about the U.S. is much more diverse and nuanced than is generally believed. Chiozza examines the character, source, and persistence of foreign attitudes toward the United States. His findings are based on worldwide public opinion databases that surveyed anti-American sentiment in Islamic countries, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and East Asia. Data compiled from responses in a wide range of categories-including politics, wealth, science and technology, popular culture, and education-indicate that anti-American sentiments vary widely across these geographic regions. Through careful analyses, Chiozza shows how foreign publics balance the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the U.S. in their own perceptions of the country. He finds that popular anti-Americanism is mostly benign and shallow; deep-seated ideological opposition to the U.S. is usually held among a minority of groups. More often, Chiozza explains, foreigners have conflicting attitudes toward the U.S. He finds that while anti-Americanism certainly exists, the United States is equally praised as a symbol of democracy and freedom, its ideals of liberty, equality, and opportunity applauded. Chiozza clearly demonstrates that what is reported as undisputed fact-that various groups abhor American values-is in reality a complex story.

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Build a better financial future for yourself and the world. Former monk turned financial advisor, Doug Lynam, shares the rules of money management that will change your approach to earning, saving, and investing.From Monk to Money Manager is an entertaining and self-deprecating journey through Lynam’s relationship with the almighty dollar—his childhood in a rich family, the long-haired hippie days running away from materialism, time in the Marine Corps looking for selfless service, and his twenty years in the monastery under a vow of poverty that led to his current profession as a financial advisor. In this unique look at wealth from a spiritual perspective, Lynam shares his belief that God doesn’t expect us to live in poverty. The truth is, we need financial peace so we can help others. When money becomes a part of our spiritual practice, used in love and service, it can bring us closer to our highest spiritual ideals.With humor and humility, Lynam uses stories told through the lens of his own money mistakes, and those of counseling clients, to understand how our attitudes about money hold us back. He also provides clear, step-by-step guidance on how to grow a little bit wealthy. His insights include how to build a compassionate relationship to our finances; some of the good, bad, and ugly truths about money; and the tricks to unlocking financial freedom.

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An in-depth study of the work of German-born industrial designer Richard Sapper, most famous for designs such as the Tizio lamp and the Brionvega radio. Richard Sapper (1932-2015) a German-born designer who was based in Milan most of his working career, is considered one of the most important designers of his generation. Within his lifetime, he received numerous international design accolades, including ten prestigious Compasso d'Oro awards. Sapper developed and designed a wide variety of products, ranging from ships and cars, to computers and electronics as well as furniture and kitchen appliances. His clients included Alessi, Artemide, B&B Italia, Brionvega, FIAT, Heuer, Kartell, Knoll, IBM, Lenovo, Lorenz Milano, Magis, Molteni, Pirelli and many others. This investigation of Sapper's work, based on over forty hours of interviews with the designer Jonathan Olivares, studies his objects, the circumstances that shaped them and the resulting ideals that emerge. The inter-generational conversation explores themes that reoccur throughout Sapper's oeuvre, and which have a particular importance for a younger generation of designers and those with a desire to understand Sapper's work from a fresh perspective. An illustrated timeline, packed with images from Sapper's personal archives, reveals the incredible variety and technical brilliance of his work. Richard Sapper died in Milan on 31 December 2015. Designed by SM Associati, the agency of Marco Velardi from Apartamento magazine, the book opens with an image essay featuring candid commissioned photography by Ramak Fazel.

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Classical Athenian literature often speaks of democratic politics in sexual terms. Citizens are urged to become lovers of the polis, and politicians claim to be lovers of the people. Victoria Wohl argues that this was no dead metaphor. Exploring the intersection between eros and politics in democratic Athens, Wohl traces the private desires aroused by public ideology and the political consequences of citizens' most intimate longings. Love among the Ruins analyzes the civic fantasies that lay beneath (but not necessarily parallel to) Athens's political ideology. It shows how desire can disrupt politics and provides a deeper--at times disturbing--insight into the democratic unconscious of ancient Athens. The Athenians imagined the perfect citizen as a noble and manly lover. But this icon conceals a multitude of other possible figures: sexy tyrants, potent pathics, and seductive perverts. Through critical re-readings of canonical texts, Wohl investigates these fantasies, which seem so antithetical to Athens's manifest ideals. She examines the interrelation of patriotism and narcissism, the trope of politics as prostitution, the elite suspicion of political pleasure, and the status of perversion within Athens's sexual and political norms. She also discusses the morbid drive that propelled Athenian imperialism, as well as democratic Athens's paradoxical fascination with the joys of tyranny. Drawing on contemporary critical theory in original ways, Wohl sketches the relationship between citizen psyche and political life to illuminate the complex, frequently contradictory passions that structure democracy, ancient and modern.

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The Congo-Océan railroad stretches across the Republic of Congo from Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noir. It was completed in 1934, when Equatorial Africa was a French colony, and it stands as one of the deadliest construction projects in history. Colonial workers were subjects of an ostensibly democratic nation whose motto read “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” but liberal ideals were savaged by a cruelly indifferent administrative state. African workers were forcibly conscripted and separated from their families, and subjected to hellish conditions as they hacked their way through dense tropical foliage—a “forest of no joy”; excavated by hand thousands of tons of earth in order to lay down track; blasted their way through rock to construct tunnels; or risked their lives building bridges over otherwise impassable rivers. In the process, they suffered disease, malnutrition, and rampant physical abuse, likely resulting in at least 20,000 deaths. In the Forest of No Joy captures in vivid detail the experiences of the men, women, and children who toiled on the railroad, and forces a reassessment of the moral relationship between modern industrialized empires and what could be called global humanitarian impulses—the desire to improve the lives of people outside of Europe. Drawing on exhaustive research in French and Congolese archives, a chilling documentary record, and heartbreaking photographic evidence, J.P. Daughton tells the epic story of the Congo-Océan railroad, and in doing so reveals the human costs and contradictions of modern empire.

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Winner, 2023 Joseph Fletcher Prize for Best Edited Book in Historical International Relations, History Section, International Studies AssociationIdeology drives American foreign policy in ways seen and unseen. Racialized notions of subjecthood and civilization underlay the political revolution of eighteenth-century white colonizers; neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and unilateralism propelled the post–Cold War United States to unleash catastrophe in the Middle East. Ideologies order and explain the world, project the illusion of controllable outcomes, and often explain success and failure. How does the history of U.S. foreign relations appear differently when viewed through the lens of ideology?This book explores the ideological landscape of international relations from the colonial era to the present. Contributors examine ideologies developed to justify—or resist—white settler colonialism and free-trade imperialism, and they discuss the role of nationalism in immigration policy. The book reveals new insights on the role of ideas at the intersection of U.S. foreign and domestic policy and politics. It shows how the ideals coded as “civilization,” “freedom,” and “democracy” legitimized U.S. military interventions and enabled foreign leaders to turn American power to their benefit. The book traces the ideological struggle over competing visions of democracy and of American democracy’s place in the world and in history. It highlights sources beyond the realm of traditional diplomatic history, including nonstate actors and historically marginalized voices. Featuring the foremost specialists as well as rising stars, this book offers a foundational statement on the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy.

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The Vale of the Red Horse, Edgehill, Warwickshire, October, 1642. Bitter divisions that have grown unchecked in the kingdoms of the Stuart dynasty are about to engulf England in a bloody civil war. 30,000 men have gathered to determine the fate of nations and to pursue their own ideals and enmities through brutal and bloody combat. Many have never handled a weapon or strayed far from their native shire. Among them are Anthony Sedley the Birmingham iron worker and Leveller, Robbie Needham, an embittered lead miner from Derbyshire who picks up a pike for his king, George Merrick, the young Oxford graduate whose prospects have been blighted by court corruption, Hywel Lloyd, a proud Welsh hill farmer, and William Bennet the struggling merchant who has staked everything to raise a company for the parliamentary cause. Then there are the half-brothers, Ralph and Francis Reeve, sons of a Suffolk farmer. Pious Francis has abandoned his studies at Cambridge to make England a New Jerusalem, cleansed of sin and filth. He despises his carefree brother and the father who seems to favour him. Caught cuckolding a London merchant, Ralph has forfeited his apprenticeship and indenture money. He dreams of restoring his honour and his fortune when he returns to London with the king's victorious army. But first the brothers must face each other in the Vale of the Red Horse, the horse whose rider is War... God's vindictive wrath!

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This informed and lively book offers a timely analysis of the UK government's sustainable - or subsequently 'integrated' - transport policy 10 years after the publication of "A New Deal for Transport: Better for Everyone". Written by prominent transport experts and with a foreword by Christian Wolmar, the book identifies the modest successes and, sadly, the far more significant failures in government policy over the last decade. The authors also uncover why it has proved so difficult to adopt a more sustainable approach to transport and break Britain's love-affair with the car. The book reviews the links between the idea of sustainability and transport policy, and provides an up-to-the-minute analysis of the political realities surrounding the delivery of a sustainable transport agenda in the UK. It picks up on the principal components of "A New Deal for Transport" and evaluates to what extent these have, or haven't, been delivered in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The contributors analyse why delivering sustainable transport policies seems to present particular difficulties to ministers across the UK, and considers the UK's experience in an international perspective. The book draws lessons from the last 10 years in order to better inform future policy development. "Traffic Jam" is an indispensable analysis of the difficulties involved in turning policy ideals into practical reality, and as such will be of interest to scholars, students, planners, policy analysts and policy makers.

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Striking new readings of Montaigne's works, focussing on such concepts as scepticism and tolerance. Montaigne's Essais (1580-1592) are one of the most remarkable works of the European Renaissance. The Essais' innovative open-mindedness is at odds with the dogmatism and intolerance of their times, the decades of civil and religious wars in France, and their tolerant and searching human questions and ethics of difference remain compelling for twenty-first century readers. But the sceptical open-endedness that vitalizes this writing is also often troubled and troubling: personal losses and the collapse of cultural ideals moved Montaigne to write, and their attendant anxieties are not resolved into tranquil reflection. Unsettling Montaigne reassesses Montaigne's scepticism. Informed by psychoanalytic and related theory, its close attention to Montaigne's complex uses of metaphor illuminates the psychic economy of his scepticism and tolerance and their poetics, while new readings ofhis Essais and other texts reveal the significance of disquieting questions, thought and affect for the ethos his writing fosters. The analysis deals with figures such as cannibals and cannibalism, hunger, shaking, tickling, place, the brother, and haunting in Montaigne's exploration of concepts which tested his understanding and self-understanding. The volume also demonstrates how figuration supports openness to difference for both writer and readers, and is fundamental to this writing's aesthetic, psychic and ethical creativity. Elizabeth Guild lectures in French at the University of Cambridge, and is a Fellow of Robinson College.

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As Boston approaches its four-hundredth anniversary, it is remarkable that it still maintains its historic character despite constant development. The fifty buildings featured in this book all pre-date 1800 and illustrate Boston’s early history. This is the first book to survey Boston’s fifty oldest buildings and does so through an approachable narrative which will appeal to nonarchitects and those new to historic preservation. Beginning with a map of the buildings’ locations and an overview of the historic preservation movement in Boston, the book looks at the fifty buildings in order from oldest to most ­recent. Geographically, the majority of the buildings are located within the downtown area of Boston along the Freedom Trail and within easy walking distance from the core of the city. This makes the book an ideal guide for tourists, and residents of the city will also find it interesting as it includes numerous properties in the surrounding neighborhoods. The buildings span multiple uses from homes to churches and warehouses to restaurants. Each chapter features a building, a narrative focusing on its historical significance, and the efforts made to preserve it over time. Full ­color photos and historical drawings illustrate each building and area. Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them presents the ideals of historic preservation in an approachable and easy­-to-­read manner appropriate for the broadest audience. Perfect for history lovers, architectural enthusiasts, and tourists alike.

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