Search results for ""Ideals""

From scholars to novelists to poets, the publishing firm of Henry Holt & Co. established and maintained a distinguished tradition of identifying, nurturing, and publishing important thinkers and writers of the day early in their careers. This book examines the founding and growth of Holt & Co. with particular attention to this tradition and to the roles of key figures in the company's history as a trade book publisher. Part One is a chronological account of Holt & Co.'s development, beginning with its founding in 1866 by the man sometimes referred to as "the Dean of American publishing," Henry Holt, and ending in 1946, when the talented editor William Sloane left Holt & Co. and a new era, dominated by big business interests, began for the firm. Part Two offers a more detailed look at the ways in which Henry Holt, Alfred Harcourt, Lincoln MacVeagh, and William Sloane worked with particular authors, including Frost, William James, Hardy, Henry Adams, Dewey, Turgenev, Sandburg, Lewis, and Lippmann. Gilbert also discusses Untermeyer, BenD,et, Housman, de la Mare, Van Doren, and Ciardi, notable examples of Holt & Co.'s reputation as an important publisher of poets. The tension between commercial interests and literary ideals in publishing, decried by Henry Holt nearly ninety years ago and disdained by William Sloane over forty years ago, remains very much a part of the publishing scene today. Based on the wide use of primary sources, this volume provides an instructive, in-depth look at an important American publishing house.

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A rare behind-the-scenes look at the work of forensic scientistsThe findings of forensic science—from DNA profiles and chemical identifications of illegal drugs to comparisons of bullets, fingerprints, and shoeprints—are widely used in police investigations and courtroom proceedings. While we recognize the significance of this evidence for criminal justice, the actual work of forensic scientists is rarely examined and largely misunderstood. Blood, Powder, and Residue goes inside a metropolitan crime laboratory to shed light on the complex social forces that underlie the analysis of forensic evidence.Drawing on eighteen months of rigorous fieldwork in a crime lab of a major metro area, Beth Bechky tells the stories of the forensic scientists who struggle to deliver unbiased science while under intense pressure from adversarial lawyers, escalating standards of evidence, and critical public scrutiny. Bechky brings to life the daily challenges these scientists face, from the painstaking screening and testing of evidence to making communal decisions about writing up the lab report, all while worrying about attorneys asking them uninformed questions in court. She shows how the work of forensic scientists is fraught with the tensions of serving justice—constantly having to anticipate the expectations of the world of law and the assumptions of the public—while also staying true to their scientific ideals.Blood, Powder, and Residue offers a vivid and sometimes harrowing picture of the lives of highly trained experts tasked with translating their knowledge for others who depend on it to deliver justice.

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"Property rights" and "Russia" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. A Public Empire refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning "public things" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects--rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics--should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing "the public" through the reform of property rights.

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New approaches to understanding religious women's involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women's experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed. Over the last two decades, scholarship has presented a more nuanced view of women's attitude to and agency in medieval monastic reform, challenging the idea that they were, by and large, unwilling to accept or were necessarily hostile towards reform initiatives. Rather, it has shown that they actively participated in debates about the ideas and structures that shaped their religious lives, whether rejecting, embracing, or adapting to calls for "reform" contingent on their circumstances. Nevertheless, fundamental questions regarding the gendered nature of religious reform are ripe for further examination. This book brings together innovative research from a range of disciplines to re-evaluate and enlarge our knowledge of women's involvement in spiritual and institutional change in female monastic communities over the period c. 1000 - c. 1500. Contributors revise conventional narratives about women and monastic reform, and earlier assumptions of reform as negative or irrelevant for women. Drawing on a diverse array of visual, material and textual sources, it presents "snapshots" of reform from western Europe, stretching from Ireland to Iberia. Case-studies focussing on a number of different topics, from tenth-century female saints' lives to fifteenth-century liturgical books, from the tenth-century Leominster prayerbook to archaeological remains in Ireland, from embroideries and tapestries to the rebellious nuns of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, offer a critical reappraisal of how monastic women (and their male associates) reflected, individually and collectively, on their spiritual ideals and institutional forms.

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Examines psychiatric epidemiology's unique evolution, conceptually and socially, within and between diverse regions and cultures, underscoring its growing influence on the biopolitics of nations and worldwide health campaigns. Psychiatric epidemiology, like the epidemiology of cancer, heart disease, or AIDS, contributes increasingly to shaping the biopolitics of nations and worldwide health campaigns. Despite the field's importance, this is the first volume of historical scholarship addressing psychiatric epidemiology. It seeks to comprehensively trace the development of the discipline and the mobilization of its constructs, methods, and tools to further social ends. It is through this double lens—conceptual and social—that it envisions the history of psychiatric epidemiology. Furthermore, its chapters constitute elements for that history as a global phenomenon, formed by multiple approaches. Those numerous historical paths have not resulted in a uniform disciplinary field based on a common paradigm, as happened arguably in the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease and cancer, but in a plurality of psychiatric epidemiologies driven by different intellectual questions, political strategies, reformist ideals, national cultures, colonial experiences, international influences, and social control objectives. When examined together, the chapters depict an uneven global development of epidemiologies formed within distinct political-cultural regions but influenced by the transnational circulation and selective uptake of concepts, techniques, and expertise. These moved through multidirectional pathways between and within the Global North and South. Authored by historians, anthropologists, and psychiatrists, chapters trace this complex history, focusing on Brazil, Nigeria, Senegal, India, Taiwan, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, as well as multicountry networks.

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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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In Freedomland, Annemarie H. Sammartino tells Co-op City's story from the perspectives of those who built it and of the ordinary people who made their homes in this monument to imperfect liberal ideals of economic and social justice. Located on the grounds of the former Freedomland amusement park on the northeastern edge of the Bronx, Co-op City's 35 towers and 236 townhouses have been home to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and is an icon visible to all traveling on the east coast corridor. In 1965, Co-op City was planned as the largest middle-class housing development in the United States. It was intended as a solution to the problem of affordable housing in America's largest city. While Co-op City first appeared to be a huge success story for integrated, middle-class housing, tensions would lead its residents to organize the largest rent strike in American history. In 1975, a coalition of shareholders took on New York State and, against all odds, secured resident control. Much to the dismay of many denizens of the complex, even this achievement did not halt either rising costs or white flight. Nevertheless, after the challenges of the 1970s and 1980s, the cooperative achieved a hard-won stability as the twentieth century came to a close. Freedomland chronicles the tumultuous first quarter century of Co-op City's existence. Sammartino's narrative connects planning, economic, and political history and the history of race in America. The result is a new perspective on twentieth-century New York City.

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A New Juvenile Justice System aims at nothing less than a complete reform of the existing system: not minor change or even significant overhaul, but the replacement of the existing system with a different vision. The authors in this volume—academics, activists, researchers, and those who serve in the existing system—all respond in this collection to the question of what the system should be. Uniformly, they agree that an ideal system should be centered around the principle of child well-being and the goal of helping kids to achieve productive lives as citizens and members of their communities. Rather than the existing system, with its punitive, destructive, undermining effect and uneven application by race and gender, these authors envision a system responsive to the needs of youth as well as to the community’s legitimate need for public safety. How, they ask, can the ideals of equality, freedom, liberty, and self-determination transform the system? How can we improve the odds that children who have been labeled as “delinquent” can make successful transitions to adulthood? And how can we create a system that relies on proven, family-focused interventions and creates opportunities for positive youth development? Drawing upon interdisciplinary work as well as on-the-ground programs and experience, the authors sketch out the broad parameters of such a system. Providing the principles, goals, and concrete means to achieve them, this volume imagines using our resources wisely and well to invest in all children and their potential to contribute and thrive in our society.

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Finalist, 2020 Latino Book Awards, Best Academic Themed Book The surprising effects of American TV on global viewers As a dominant cultural export, American television is often the first exposure to American ideals and the English language for many people throughout the world. Yet, American television is flawed, and, it represents race, class, and gender in ways that many find unfair and unrealistic. What happens, then, when people who grew up on American television decide to come to the United States? What do they expect to find, and what do they actually find? In America, As Seen on TV, Clara E. Rodríguez surveys international college students and foreign nationals working or living in the US to examine the impact of American television on their views of the US and on their expectations of life in the United States. She finds that many were surprised to learn that America is racially and economically diverse, and that it is not the easy-breezy, happy endings culture portrayed in the media, but a work culture. The author also surveys US-millennials about their consumption of US TV and finds that both groups share the sense that American TV does not accurately reflect racial/ethnic relations in the US as they have experienced them. However, the groups differ on how much they think US TV has influenced their views on sex, smoking and drinking. America, As Seen on TV explores the surprising effects of TV on global viewers and the realities they and US millennials actually experience in the US.

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Winner of the 2021 Sara A. Whaley Prize of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) A first-of-its-kind study of the working-class culture of resistance on the Honduran North Coast and the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention at the onset of the Cold War, examining gender, race, and place. On May 1, 1954, striking banana workers on the North Coast of Honduras brought the regional economy to a standstill, invigorating the Honduran labor movement and placing a series of demands on the US-controlled banana industry. Their actions ultimately galvanized a broader working-class struggle and reawakened long-suppressed leftist ideals. The first account of its kind in English, Roots of Resistance explores contemporary Honduran labor history through the story of the great banana strike of 1954 and centers the role of women in the narrative of the labor movement. Drawing on extensive firsthand oral history and archival research, Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda examines the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention in Honduras at the onset of the Cold War. She reveals the everyday acts of resistance that laid the groundwork for the 1954 strike and argues that these often-overlooked forms of resistance should inform analyses of present-day labor and community organizing. Roots of Resistance highlights the complexities of transnational company hierarchies, gender and race relations, and labor organizing that led to the banana workers' strike and how these dynamics continue to reverberate in Honduras today.

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For more than a millennium, Islam has been a vital part of Western civilization. Today, however, it is sometimes assumed that Islam is a foreign element inside the West, and even that Islam and the West are doomed to be in perpetual conflict. The need for accurate, reliable scholarship on this topic has never been more urgent. The Bloomsbury Reader on Islam in the West brings together some of the most important, up-to-date scholarly writings published on this subject. The Reader explores not only the presence of Muslim religious practitioners in Europe and the Americas but also the impact of Islamic ideas and Muslims on Western politics, societies, and cultures. It is ideal for use in the university classroom, with an extensive introduction by Edward E. Curtis IV and a timeline of key events in the history of Islam in the West. A brief introduction to the author and the topic is provided at the start of each excerpt. Part 1, on the history of Islam in the West, probes the role of Muslims and the significance of Islam in medieval, early modern, and modern settings such as Islamic Spain, colonial-era Latin America, sixteenth-century France, nineteenth-century Crimea, interwar Albania, the post-World War II United States, and late twentieth-century Germany. Part 2 focuses on the contemporary West, examining debates over Muslim citizenship, the war on terrorism, anti-Muslim prejudice, and Islam and gender, while also providing readers with a concrete sense of how Muslims practise and live out Islamic ideals in their private and public lives.

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The first intellectual biography of Alexander Hetherwick, a key figure in Scotland-Malawi relations Makes extensive use of rarely consulted primary sources, both in Malawi and in Scotland, with particular attention to Hetherwick's prolific correspondence Includes a fresh account of the dynamics at play in the creation of Malawi as a nation, with special attention to the role played by Scottish missionaries, Hetherwick in particular Presents a critical examination of the way in which Blantyre Mission both absorbed and resisted the prevailing racism and colonialism of the early 20th century Presents an appraisal of Blantyre Mission's distinctive philosophy and policy; and of how, under Hetherwick's leadership, it navigated the social, cultural and political challenges of the early 20th century Mission, race and colonialism were three forces shaping Malawi's history during the early years of the twentieth century. These three found a concentrated meeting point in the life of Scottish missionary Alexander Hetherwick, who led Blantyre Mission from 1898 to 1928. This book presents a fresh assessment of this towering figure in Malawi's history, contesting the scholarly consensus that Hetherwick betrayed the early ideals of Blantyre Mission by compromising too much with the colonial system that was in force during his leadership. The book assesses the pervasive influence of colonialism, from which Hetherwick was not exempt, and traces the ways in which he resisted such influence through his relentless commitment to the interests of the African community and the inspiration he found in the emergence of the African church.

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From Revolutionaries to Citizens is the first comprehensive account of the most important antiwar campaign prior to World War I: the antimilitarism of the French Left. Covering the views and actions of socialists, trade unionists, and anarchists from the time of France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870 to the outbreak of hostilities with Germany in 1914, Paul B. Miller tackles a fundamental question of prewar historiography: how did the most antimilitarist culture and society in Europe come to accept and even support war in 1914?Although more general accounts of the Left’s “failure” to halt international war in August 1914 focus on its lack of unity or the decline of trade unionism, Miller contends that these explanations barely scratch the surface when it comes to interpreting the Left’s overwhelming acceptance of the war. By embedding his cultural analysis of antimilitarist propaganda into the larger political and diplomatic history of prewar Europe, he reveals the Left’s seemingly sudden transformation “from revolutionaries to citizens” as less a failure of resolve than a confession of commonality with the broader ideals of republican France. Examining sources ranging from police files and court records to German and British foreign office memos, Miller emphasizes the success of antimilitarism as a rallying cry against social and political inequities on behalf of ordinary citizens. Despite their keen awareness of the bloodletting that awaited Europe, he claims, antimilitarists ultimately accepted the war with Germany for the same reason they had pursued their own struggle within France: to address injustices and defend the rights of citizens in a democratic society.

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What does it mean to live out the theology presented in the Great Commandment to “love God above all and to love your neighbor as yourself”? In Blood and Fire, Poloma and Hood explore how understandings of godly love function to empower believers. Though godly love may begin as a perceived relationship between God and a person, it is made manifest as social behavior among people. Blood and Fire offers a deep ethnographic portrait of a charismatic church and its faith-based ministry, illuminating how religiously motivated social service makes use of beliefs about the nature of God's love. It traces the triumphs and travails associated with living a set of rigorous religious ideals, providing a richly textured analysis of a faith community affiliated with the “emerging church” movement in Pentecostalism, one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic religious movements of our day. Based on more than four years of interviews and surveys with people from all levels of the organization, from the leader to core and marginal members to the poor and addicts they are seeking to serve, Blood and Fire sheds light on the differing worldviews and religious perceptions between those who served in as well as those who were served by this ministry. Blood and Fire argues that godly love— the relationship between perceived divine love and human response— is at the heart of the vision of emerging churches, and that it is essential to understand this dynamic if one is to understand the ongoing reinvention of American Protestantism in the twenty-first century.

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In a brilliantly conceived and elegantly written book, Rogan Kersh investigates the idea of national union in the United States. For much of the period between the colonial era and the late nineteenth century, he shows, "union" was the principal rhetorical means by which Americans expressed shared ideals and a common identity without invoking strong nationalism or centralized governance. Through his exploration of how Americans once succeeded in uniting a diverse and fragmented citizenry, Kersh revives a long-forgotten source of U.S. national identity. Why and how did Americans perceive themselves as one people from the early history of the republic? How did African Americans and others at the margins of U.S. civic culture apply this concept of union? Why did the term disappear from vernacular after the 1880s? In his search for answers, Kersh employs a wide range of methods, including political-theory analysis of writings by James Madison, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln and empirical analysis drawing on his own extensive database of American newspapers. The author's findings are persuasive—and often surprising. One intriguing development, for instance, was a strong resurgence of union feelings among Southerners—including prominent former secessionists—after the Civil War. With its fascinating and novel approach, Dreams of a More Perfect Union offers valuable insights about American political history, especially the rise of nationalism and federalism. Equally important, the author's close retracing of the religious, institutional, and other themes coloring the development of unionist thought unveils new knowledge about the origination and transmittal of ideas in a polity.

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A Theory of Shopping offers a highly original perspective on one of our most basic everyday activities - shopping. We commonly assume that shopping is primarily concerned with individuals and materialism. But Miller rejects this assumption and follows the surprising route of analysing shopping by means of an analogy with anthropological studies of sacrificial ritual. He argues that the act of purchasing goods is almost always linked to other social relations, and most especially those based on love and care. The ethnographic sections of the book are based on a year's study of shopping on a street in North London. This provides the basis for a sensitive description of the issues the shopper confronts when making decisions as to what to buy. Miller develops a theory to account for these observations, arguing that shopping typically consists of three major stages which reflect the three key stages of many rites of sacrifice. In both shopping and sacrifice the ultimate intention is to constitute others as desiring subjects. Finally the book examines certain historical shifts in both subjects and objects of devotion, in particular, ideals of gender and love. This treatment of shopping from the perspective of comparative anthropology represents a highly innovative approach to one of the most familiar tasks of our daily lives. Written in a clear and accessible manner, this book will be of interest to students and academics in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as well as anybody who wants to consider more deeply the nature of their own everyday activities.

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A rare behind-the-scenes look at the work of forensic scientistsThe findings of forensic science—from DNA profiles and chemical identifications of illegal drugs to comparisons of bullets, fingerprints, and shoeprints—are widely used in police investigations and courtroom proceedings. While we recognize the significance of this evidence for criminal justice, the actual work of forensic scientists is rarely examined and largely misunderstood. Blood, Powder, and Residue goes inside a metropolitan crime laboratory to shed light on the complex social forces that underlie the analysis of forensic evidence.Drawing on eighteen months of rigorous fieldwork in a crime lab of a major metro area, Beth Bechky tells the stories of the forensic scientists who struggle to deliver unbiased science while under intense pressure from adversarial lawyers, escalating standards of evidence, and critical public scrutiny. Bechky brings to life the daily challenges these scientists face, from the painstaking screening and testing of evidence to making communal decisions about writing up the lab report, all while worrying about attorneys asking them uninformed questions in court. She shows how the work of forensic scientists is fraught with the tensions of serving justice—constantly having to anticipate the expectations of the world of law and the assumptions of the public—while also staying true to their scientific ideals.Blood, Powder, and Residue offers a vivid and sometimes harrowing picture of the lives of highly trained experts tasked with translating their knowledge for others who depend on it to deliver justice.

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The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that littered the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine. During the period of the pivotal growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors embraced it as a marvel while others decried it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing.Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing?Track Changes balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the seemingly ineffable act of writing is always grounded in particular instruments and media, from quills to keyboards. Along the way, we discover the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, explore the surprisingly varied reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud.

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Student-Centered Leadership offers a timely and thoughtful resource for school leaders who want to turn their ideals into action. Written by educational leadership expert Viviane Robinson, the book shows leaders how they can make a bigger difference to the quality of teaching and learning in their school and ultimately improve their students' performance. This book is based not on fad or fashion but on the best available evidence about the impact of different types of leadership on student outcomes. The book includes examples of five types of leadership practice as well as rich accounts of the knowledge and skills that leaders need to employ them with confidence. Filled with practical lessons, clear information, and much inspiration, Robinson encourages leaders to experiment with changing how they lead so they can transform their schools for the better. Student-Centered Leadership is part of the Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education series. Praise for Student-Centered Leadership "Student-Centered Leadership shines with clarity and practical, powerful ideas. Add this book to your leadership library."—Michael Fullan, author, The Six Secrets of Change and Leading in a Culture of Change "Viviane Robinson's compelling book is both evidence based and profoundly practical."—Steve Munby, chief executive, National College for Leadership of Schools and Children's Services, England "This book will be an equally important resource for individual school leaders, professional developers, and administrator-preparation programs. There will be two copies on my shelf—one to loan and one for my own reference."—Karen Seashore Louis, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota

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In the dramatic narratives that comprise The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. Revisiting historical icons so familiar that schoolchildren learn to take them for granted, he makes surprising connections that enable readers to see old stories in a new light. Among the historical moments revisited here, a revolutionary nation arises from its environment and struggles to reconcile the diversity of its people with the claim that nature is the source of liberty. Abraham Lincoln, an unlettered citizen from the countryside, steers the Union through a moment of extreme peril, guided by his clear-eyed vision of nature's capacity for improvement. In Topeka, Kansas, transformations of land and life prompt a lawsuit that culminates in the momentous civil rights case of Brown v. Board of Education. By focusing on materials and processes intrinsic to all things and by highlighting the nature of the United States, Fiege recovers the forgotten and overlooked ground on which so much history has unfolded. In these pages, the nation's birth and development, pain and sorrow, ideals and enduring promise come to life as never before, making a once-familiar past seem new. The Republic of Nature points to a startlingly different version of history that calls on readers to reconnect with fundamental forces that shaped the American experience. For more information, visit the author's website: http://republicofnature.com/

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Mennonite German Soldiers traces the efforts of a small, pacifist, Christian religious minority in eastern Prussia-the Mennonite communities of the Vistula River basin-to preserve their exemption from military service, which was based on their religious confession of faith. Conscription was mandatory for nearly all male Prussian citizens, and the willingness to fight and die for country was essential to the ideals of a developing German national identity. In this engaging historical narrative, Mark Jantzen describes the policies of the Prussian federal and regional governments toward the Mennonites over a hundred-year period and the legal, economic, and social pressures brought to bear on the Mennonites to conform. Mennonite leaders defended the exemptions of their communities' sons through a long history of petitions and legal pleas, and sought alternative ways, such as charitable donations, to support the state and prove their loyalty. Faced with increasingly punitive legal and financial restrictions, as well as widespread social disapproval, many Mennonites ultimately emigrated, and many others chose to join the German nation at the cost of their religious tradition. Jantzen tells the history of the Mennonite experience in Prussian territories against the backdrop of larger themes of Prussian state-building and the growth of German nationalism. The Mennonites, who lived on the margins of German society, were also active agents in the long struggle of the state to integrate them. The public debates over their place in Prussian society shed light on a multi-confessional German past and on the dissemination of nationalist values.

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The largely successful trajectory of participatory democracy in post-1988 Brazil is well documented, but much less is known about its origins in the 1970s and early 1980s. In Participatory Democracy in Brazil: Socioeconomic and Political Origins, J. Ricardo Tranjan recounts the creation of participatory democracy in Brazil. He positions the well-known Porto Alegre participatory budgeting at the end of three interrelated and partially overlapping processes: a series of incremental steps toward broader political participation taking place throughout the twentieth century; short-lived and only partially successful attempts to promote citizen participation in municipal administration in the 1970s; and setbacks restricting direct citizen participation in the 1980s. What emerges is a clearly delineated history of how socioeconomic contexts shaped Brazil’s first participatory administrations. Tranjan first examines Brazil’s long history of institutional exclusion of certain segments of the population and controlled inclusion of others, actions that fueled nationwide movements calling for direct citizen participation in the 1960s. He then presents three case studies of municipal administrations in the late 1970s and early 1980s that foreground the impact of socioeconomic factors in the emergence, design, and outcome of participatory initiatives. The contrast of these precursory experiences with the internationally known 1990s participatory models shows how participatory ideals and practices responded to the changing institutional context of the 1980s. The final part of his analysis places developments in participatory discourses and practices in the 1980s within the context of national-level political-institutional changes; in doing so, he helps bridge the gap between the local-level participatory democracy and democratization literatures.

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In The Formation of Souls: Imagery of the Republic in Brazil, José Murilo de Carvalho examines the birth of the Brazilian Republic in 1889. Given that the majority of the population of Brazil participated very little in the change from an empire to a republic, what allowed the new government to consolidate its power? As a part of the answer to this question, Carvalho analyzes a collection of republican symbols, images, allegories, and myths of the period as attempts by various republican political elites to shape the collective social imagination. As Carvalho explains, the expansion of popular participation in republican ideals would have been nearly impossible through a purely theoretical, ideological discourse, so it had to be achieved by more universal, accessible means, appealing to collective sentiment through stories and images of heroes and founding fathers, images of women, and national flags and anthems. In this concise but heavily illustrated study, Carvalho demonstrates how the foundational symbols created for the new republic reflected important ideological battles over the nature of the new Brazilian regime. He evaluates the acceptance or rejection of these symbols by the public, that is, their efficacy or failure in promoting the legitimization of the new political system and redefining the collective identity of Brazilians. Available for the first time in an English translation, The Formation of Souls: Imagery of the Republic in Brazil will appeal to all students and scholars of history, political science, and Latin American studies who are interested in one of the key moments of Brazilian political history.

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During and especially after the Second World War, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war's devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate Western liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of western desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing. In light of their epoch's calamities these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and holocaust. Confronting their period's dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity, but which Enlightenment we should wish to have. Decades later, in the midst of a new type of war and reanimated discussions of the concept of evil, we share no small stake in assessing their successes and limitations.

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For decades we've been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there's still little consensus on what works, and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on, however, is that schools need to be held accountable--we need to know whether what they're doing is actually working. But what does that mean in practice? High-stakes tests. Lots of them. And that has become a major problem. Daniel Koretz, one of the nation's foremost experts on educational testing, argues in The Testing Charade that the whole idea of test-based accountability has failed--it has increasingly become an end in itself, harming students and corrupting the very ideals of teaching. In this powerful polemic, built on unimpeachable evidence and rooted in decades of experience with educational testing, Koretz calls out high-stakes testing as a sham, a false idol that is ripe for manipulation and shows little evidence of leading to educational improvement. Rather than setting up incentives to divert instructional time to pointless test prep, he argues, we need to measure what matters, and measure it in multiple ways--not just via standardized tests. Right now, we're lying to ourselves about whether our children are learning. And the longer we accept that lie, the more damage we do. It's time to end our blind reliance on high-stakes tests. With The Testing Charade, Daniel Koretz insists that we face the facts and change course, and he gives us a blueprint for doing better.

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

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Longlisted for the RUNCIMAN AWARD, 2021Medicine is one of the great fields of achievement of the Ancient Greeks. Hippocrates is celebrated worldwide as the father of medicine and the Hippocratic Oath is admired throughout the medical profession as a founding statement of ethics and ideals. In the fifth century BC, Greeks even wrote of medicine as a newly discovered craft they had invented.Robin Lane Fox's remarkable book puts their invention of medicine in a wider context, from the epic poems of Homer to the first doctors known to have been active in the Greek world. He examines what we do and do not know about Hippocrates and his Oath and the many writings that survive under his name. He then focuses on seven core texts which give the case histories of named individuals, showing that books 1 and 3 belong far earlier than previously recognised. Their re-dating has important consequences for the medical awareness of the great Greek dramatists and the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Robin Lane Fox pieces together the doctor's thinking from his terse observations and relates it in a new way to the history of Greek prose and ideas.This original and compelling book opens windows onto many other aspects of the classical world, from women's medicine to street-life, empire, art, sport, sex and even botany. It fills a dark decade in a new way and carries readers along an extraordinary journey form Homer's epics to the grateful heirs of the Greek case histories, first in the Islamic world and then in early modern Europe.

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The Fitzgeralds are buttressed by wealth and privilege, but they are also buffeted by crisis after crisis, many of their own creation. Even so, they live large, in love and in strife, wielding power, combating adversaries and each other. The Good Family Fitzgerald is a saga of money and ambition, crime and the Catholic Church, a sprawling, passionate story shaped against a background of social discord.Padraic Fitzgerald is the up-from-nothing, aging patriarch whose considerable business interests appear anything but legitimate, but he has bigger problems than law enforcement. A widower, Paddy becomes enmeshed with a young woman who will force him to re-examine his cardinal assumptions. Meanwhile, he has cultivated thorny relationships with his four children, all of whom struggle over the terms of connection with their father. Anthony—oldest son, principled criminal defense attorney, designated prince of the family—and his cherished Francesca are devastated by tragedy. In the aftermath, Frankie comes to play a vital role in Fitzgerald lore. Philip is a charismatic Catholic priest spectacularly torn between his lofty ideals and aspirations and his all-too-human flaws and longings. Matty has wandered aimlessly, but once he finds his purpose, he precipitates turmoil in all quarters. Colleen, the youngest, is a seeker who styles herself the outsider and the conscience of the clan. Her hands are full, as no Fitzgerald is left untested or unscathed, and by the end the whole family, as well as those venturing into their realm, will be stunned into illumination.

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Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population was an immediate succès de scandale when it appeared in 1798. Arguing that nature is niggardly and that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in “perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery,” he found himself attacked on all sides—by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. Though Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. This book is at once a major reassessment of Malthus’s ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment.Against the ferment of Enlightenment ideals about the perfectibility of mankind and the grim realities of life in the eighteenth century, Robert Mayhew explains the genesis of the Essay and Malthus’s preoccupation with birth and death rates. He traces Malthus’s collision course with the Lake poets, his important revisions to the Essay, and composition of his other great work, Principles of Political Economy. Mayhew suggests we see the author in his later writings as an environmental economist for his persistent concern with natural resources, land, and the conditions of their use. Mayhew then pursues Malthus’s many afterlives in the Victorian world and beyond.Today, the Malthusian dilemma makes itself felt once again, as demography and climate change come together on the same environmental agenda. By opening a new door onto Malthus’s arguments and their transmission to the present day, Robert Mayhew gives historical depth to our current planetary concerns.

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In his probing study of the role of death rites in the making of Islamic society, Leor Halevi imaginatively plays prescriptive texts against material culture and advances new ways of interpreting highly contested sources. His original research reveals that religious scholars of the early Islamic period produced codes of funerary law not only to define the handling of a Muslim corpse but also to transform everyday urban practices. Relying on oral traditions, these scholars established new social patterns in the cities of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean. They distinguished Islamic rites from Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian rites and changed the way men and women interacted publicly and privately. In each chapter Halevi explores a different layer of human interaction, following the movement of the corpse from the deathbed to the grave. In the process he analyzes the real and imaginary relationships between husbands and wives, prayer leaders and mourners, and even dreamers and the dead. He describes how Muslims wailed for the deceased, prepared corpses for burial, marched in funerary processions, and prayed for the dead, highlighting the specific economic and political factors involved in these rituals as well as key religious and sexual divisions. Offering a unique perspective on the making of Islamic social and religious ideals during this early period, Halevi forges a fascinating link between the development of funerary rites and the efforts of an emerging religion to carve out its own, distinct identity. Muhammad's Grave is a groundbreaking history of the rise of Islam and the roots of contemporary Muslim attitudes toward the body and society.

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Numerous advancements are being brought in and incorporated into the cloud domain with the aim of realizing a trove of deeper and decisive automations.Rather than discussing the cloud paradigm in isolation, this fully updated text examines how cloud computing can work collaboratively with other computing models to meet the needs of evolving trends.This multi-dimensional approach encompasses the challenges of fulfilling the storage requirements of big data, the use of the cloud as a remote server for Internet of Things and sensor networks, and an investigation of how cloud computing is interlinked with other established computing phenomenon such as edge computing. New chapters illustrate the distinct ideals of the cloud-native computing, proclaimed as the next-generation cloud computing paradigm.Topics and features: Includes learning objectives, motivating questions, and self-test exercises Introduces the underlying concepts, fundamental features, and key technological foundations of cloud computing Examines how enterprise networking and cloud networking can work together to achieve business goals Reviews the different types of cloud storage available to address the evolution of data and the need for digitization Discusses the challenges and approaches to implementing cloud governance, security, and the hot topic of cloud management Describes the details of cloud migration, the crucial role of monitoring in optimizing the cloud, and the basics of disaster recovery using cloud infrastructure This technically rigorous, yet simple-to-follow textbook is an ideal resource for graduate courses on cloud computing. Professional software developers and cloud architects will also find the work to be an invaluable reference.

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“[A] meticulously researched debut novel…In a word? Juicy.” —O, The Oprah Magazine The scandalous historical love affair between Lydia Robinson and Branwell Brontë, brother to novelists Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, gives voice to the woman who allegedly brought down one of literature’s most famous families.Yorkshire, 1843: Lydia Robinson has tragically lost her precious young daughter and her mother within the same year. She returns to her bleak home, grief-stricken and unmoored. With her teenage daughters rebelling, her testy mother-in-law scrutinizing her every move, and her marriage grown cold, Lydia is restless and yearning for something more. All of that changes with the arrival of her son’s tutor, Branwell Brontë, brother of her daughters’ governess, Miss Anne Brontë and those other writerly sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Branwell has his own demons to contend with—including living up to the ideals of his intelligent family—but his presence is a breath of fresh air for Lydia. Handsome, passionate, and uninhibited by social conventions, he’s also twenty-five to her forty-three. A love of poetry, music, and theatre bring mistress and tutor together, and Branwell’s colorful tales of his sisters’ imaginative worlds form the backdrop for seduction. But their new passion comes with consequences. As Branwell’s inner turmoil rises to the surface, his behavior grows erratic, and whispers of their romantic relationship spout from Lydia’s servants’ lips, reaching all three Brontë sisters. Soon, it falls on Mrs. Robinson to save not just her reputation, but her way of life, before those clever girls reveal all her secrets in their novels. Unfortunately, she might be too late.

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Beyond the Supersquare: Art and Architecture in Latin America after Modernism, which developed from a symposium presented by the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2011, showcases original essays by distinguished Latin American architects, historians, and curators whose research examines architecture and urban design practices in the region during a significant period of the twentieth century. Drawing from the exuberant architectural projects of the 1940s to the 1960s, as well as from critically engaged artistic practices of the present day, the essays in this collection reveal how the heroic visions and utopian ideals popular in architectural discourse during the modernist era bore complicated legacies for Latin America—the consequences of which are evident in the vastly uneven economic conditions and socially disparate societies found throughout the region today. The innovative contributions in this volume address how the modernist movement came into being in Latin America and compellingly explore how it continues to resonate in today’s cultural discourse. Beyond the Supersquare takes themes traditionally examined within the strict field of urbanism and architecture and explores them against a broader range of disciplines, including the global economy, political science, gender, visual arts, philosophy, and urban planning. Containing a breadth of scholarship, this book offers a compelling and distinctive view of contemporary life in Latin America. Among the topics explored are the circulation of national cultural identities through architectural media, the intersection of contemporary art and urban social politics, and the recovery of canonically overlooked figures in art and architectural histories, such as Lina Bo Bardi and Joao Filgueiras Lima (“Lele”) from Brazil, Juan Legarreta of Mexico, and Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico.

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At the dawn of the 1970s, waves of hopeful idealists abandoned the city and headed for the country, convinced that a better life awaited. They were full of dreams, mostly lacking in practical skills, and soon utterly out of money. But they knew paradise when they saw it.When Loraine, Craig, Pancake, Hershe, and a dozen of their friends came into possession of 116 acres in Vermont, they had big plans: to grow their own food, build their own shelter, and create an enlightened community. They had little idea that at the same moment, all over the country, a million other young people were making the same move,back to the land. We Are As Gods follows the Myrtle Hill commune as its members enjoy a euphoric Free Love summer. Nearby, a fledgling organic farm sets to work with horses, and a couple,the author's parents,attempts to build a geodesic dome. Yet Myrtle Hill's summer ends in panic as they rush to build shelter while they struggle to reconcile their ideals with the somber realities of physical hardship and shifting priorities,especially when one member goes dangerously rogue.Kate Daloz has written a meticulously researched testament to the dreams of a generation disillusioned by their parents' lifestyles, scarred by the Vietnam War, and yearning for rural peace. Shaping everything from our eating habits to the Internet, the 1970s Back-to-the-Land movement is one of the most influential yet least understood periods in recent history. We Are As Gods sheds light on one generation's determination to change their own lives and, in the process, to change the world.

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Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. In Fictions of Dignity, Elizabeth S. Anker shows how the dual enabling fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. In the process, Anker examines the vital work performed by a particular kind of narrative imagination in fostering respect for human rights. Drawing on phenomenology, Anker suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abstract, decorporealized subject of liberal rights. Each of the novels Anker examines approaches human rights in terms of limits and paradoxes. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children addresses the obstacles to incorporating rights into a formerly colonized nation’s legal culture. El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero takes up controversies over women’s freedoms in Islamic society. In Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee considers the disappointments of post-apartheid reconciliation in South Africa. And in The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts an array of human rights abuses widespread in contemporary India. Each of these literary case studies further demonstrates the relevance of embodiment to both comprehending and redressing the failures of human rights, even while those narratives refuse simplistic ideals or solutions.

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Over the last four decades, the fashion modeling industry has become a lightning rod for debates about Western beauty ideals, the sexual objectification of women, and consumer desire. Yet, fashion models still captivate, embodying all that is cool, glam, hip, and desirable. They are a fixture in tabloids, magazines, fashion blogs, and television. Why exactly are models so appealing? And how do these women succeed in so soundly holding our attention? In This Year’s Model, Elizabeth Wissinger weaves together in-depth interviews and research at model castings, photo shoots, and runway shows to offer a glimpse into the life of the model throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Once an ad hoc occupation, the “model life” now involves a great deal of physical and virtual management of the body, or what Wissinger terms “glamour labor.” Wissinger argues that glamour labor—the specialized modeling work of self-styling, crafting a ‘look,’ and building an image—has been amplified by the rise of digital media, as new technologies make tinkering with the body’s form and image easy. Models can now present self-fashioning, self-surveillance, and self-branding as essential behaviors for anyone who is truly in the know and ‘in fashion.’ Countless regular people make it their mission to achieve this ideal, not realizing that technology is key to creating the unattainable standard of beauty the model upholds—and as Wissinger argues, this has been the case for decades, before Photoshop even existed. Both a vividly illustrated historical survey and an incisive critique of fashion media, This Year’s Model demonstrates the lasting cultural influence of this unique form of embodied labor.

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Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. This book reconsiders depictions of the ambiguous encounter of Mary Magdalene and Christ in the garden (John 20:11-19, known as the Noli me tangere) and that of Christ’s post-Resurrection appearance to Thomas (John 20:24-29, the Doubting Thomas) as manifestations of complex theological and art theoretical milieus. By focusing on key artistic monuments of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, the authors demonstrate a relationship between the rise of skeptical philosophy and empirical science, and the efficacy of the senses in the construction of belief. Further, the authors elucidate the differing representational strategies employed by artists to depict touch, and the ways in which these strategies were shaped by gender, social class, and educational level. Indeed, over time St. Thomas became an increasingly public--and therefore masculine--symbol of devotional verification, juridical inquiry, and empirical investigation, while St. Mary Magdalene provided a more private model for pious women, celebrating, mostly behind closed doors, the privileged and active participation of women in the faith. The authors rely on primary source material--paintings, sculptures, religious tracts, hagiography, popular sermons, and new documentary evidence. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief. Further, they add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between popular piety and the visual culture of the period.

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Originally published in 1986. Martin A. Miller, author of the definitive biography of the exiled revolutionary Peter Kropotkin, traces the history of the first generations of Russians who went to Western Europe to devote their lives to anti-tsarist politics. Refusing to assimilate abroad and unable to return home, the émigrés political orientations were influenced by intellectual and social currents in both Russia and Europe. Miller undertakes a major reassessment of the émigré contribution to the Russian revolutionary movement. Starting with Nikolai Turgenev, who in 1825 was declared the first "émigré" by a special act of the Russian government, the exiles formed a unique social and political group. Miller takes a biographical approach in tracing the progression from a disparate community of intellectuals, unable to act together to promote their own program for change, to a more cohesive second émigré generation that provided the foundation for collective action and the development of a revolutionary ideology. The creation of the Russian émigré press, Miller argues, gave identity and momentum to the émigrés and helped promote their program of revolution and a new social order. The Russian Revolutionary Emigres, 1825-1870 concludes with the death in 1870 of the leading émigré figure, Alexander Herzen, and with an analysis of the impact upon the émigrés of the emergence of the populist revolutionary movement within Russia. The émigrés overcame the loss of their homeland through their version of a future Russia, one transformed into a new society where their ideals could be realized. When, two generations later, Lenin returned to Russia after decades in Europe and made this vision a reality, his actions built on the foundation laid by his nineteenth-century predecessors.

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Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada-often disparaged as derivative and uncouth-should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax. Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonical-including Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemans-and relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Susanna Moodie, and Thomas Pringle to Henry Kendall and Alexander McLachlan. He examines in particular the nostalgic relations between home and abroad, core and periphery, whereby British emigrants used both original compositions and canonical British works to imagine connections between their colonial experiences and the lives they left behind in Europe. Drawing on archival work from four continents, Imagined Homelands insists on a wider geographic frame for nineteenth-century British literature. From lyrics printed in newspapers aboard emigrant ships heading to Australia and South Africa, to ballads circulating in New Zealand and Canadian colonial journals, poetry was a vibrant component of emigrant life. In tracing the histories of these poems and the poets who wrote them, this book provides an alternate account of nineteenth-century British poetry and, more broadly, of settler colonial culture.

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The target of intense critical comment when it was first published in 1927, Arrogant Beggar’s scathing attack on charity-run boardinghouses remains one of Anzia Yezierska’s most devastating works of social criticism. The novel follows the fortunes of its young Jewish narrator, Adele Lindner, as she leaves the impoverished conditions of New York’s Lower East Side and tries to rise in the world. Portraying Adele’s experiences at the Hellman Home for Working Girls, the first half of the novel exposes the “sickening farce” of institutionalized charity while portraying the class tensions that divided affluent German American Jews from more recently arrived Russian American Jews. The second half of the novel takes Adele back to her ghetto origins as she explores an alternative model of philanthropy by opening a restaurant that combines the communitarian ideals of Old World shtetl tradition with the contingencies of New World capitalism. Within the context of this radical message, Yezierska revisits the themes that have made her work famous, confronting complex questions of ethnic identity, assimilation, and female self-realization. Katherine Stubbs’s introduction provides a comprehensive and compelling historical, social, and literary context for this extraordinary novel and discusses the critical reaction to its publication in light of Yezierska’s biography and the once much-publicized and mythologized version of her life story. Unavailable for over sixty years, Arrogant Beggar will be enjoyed by general readers of fiction and be of crucial importance for feminist critics, students of ethnic literature. It will also prove an exciting and richly rewarding text for students and scholars of Jewish studies, immigrant literature, women’s writing, American history, and working-class fiction.

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The first investigation of how race and gender shaped the presentation and marketing of Modernist decor in postwar AmericaIn the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our continued fascination, we rarely consider how this iconic design sensibility was marketed to the diverse audiences of its era. Examining advice manuals, advertisements in Life and Ebony, furniture, art, and more, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body offers a powerful new look at how codes of race, gender, and identity influenced—and were influenced by—Modern design and shaped its presentation to consumers.Taking us to the booming suburban landscape of postwar America, Kristina Wilson demonstrates that the ideals defined by popular Modernist furnishings were far from neutral or race-blind. Advertisers offered this aesthetic to White audiences as a solution for keeping dirt and outsiders at bay, an approach that reinforced middle-class White privilege. By contrast, media arenas such as Ebony magazine presented African American readers with an image of Modernism as a style of comfort, security, and social confidence. Wilson shows how etiquette and home decorating manuals served to control women by associating them with the domestic sphere, and she considers how furniture by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, as well as smaller-scale decorative accessories, empowered some users, even while constraining others.A striking counter-narrative to conventional histories of design, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body unveils fresh perspectives on one of the most distinctive movements in American visual culture.

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The first study of album-making in the Ottoman empire during the seventeenth century, demonstrating the period’s experimentation, eclecticism, and global outlookThe Album of the World Emperor examines an extraordinary piece of art: an album of paintings, drawings, calligraphy, and European prints compiled for the Ottoman sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–17) by his courtier Kalender Paşa (d. 1616). In this detailed study of one of the most important works of seventeenth-century Ottoman art, Emine Fetvacı uses the album to explore questions of style, iconography, foreign inspiration, and the very meaning of the visual arts in the Islamic world.The album’s thirty-two folios feature artworks that range from intricate paper cutouts to the earliest examples of Islamic genre painting, and contents as eclectic as Persian and Persian-influenced calligraphy, studies of men and women of different ethnicities and backgrounds, depictions of popular entertainment and urban life, and European prints depicting Christ on the cross that in turn served as models for apocalyptic Ottoman paintings. Through the album, Fetvacı sheds light on imperial ideals as well as relationships between court life and popular culture, and shows that the boundaries between Ottoman art and the art of Iran and Western Europe were much more porous than has been assumed. Rather than perpetuating the established Ottoman idiom of the sixteenth century, the album shows that this was a time of openness to new models, outside sources, and fresh forms of expression.Beautifully illustrated and featuring all the folios of the original seventy-page album, The Album of the World Emperor revives a neglected yet significant artwork to demonstrate the distinctive aesthetic innovations of the Ottoman court.

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The first in-depth account of the historic diplomatic agreement that served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War The Helsinki Final Act was a watershed of the Cold War. Signed by thirty-five European and North American leaders at a summit in Finland in the summer of 1975, the agreement presented a vision for peace based on common principles and cooperation across the Iron Curtain. The Final Act is the first in-depth account of the diplomatic saga that produced this historic agreement. Drawing on research in eight countries and multiple languages, this gripping book explains the Final Act's emergence from the parallel crises of the Soviet bloc and the West during the 1960s, the strategies of the major players, and the conflicting designs for international order that animated the negotiations. Helsinki had originally been a Soviet idea. But after nearly three years of grinding negotiations, the Final Act reflected liberal democratic ideals more than communist ones. It rejected the Brezhnev Doctrine, provided for German reunification, endorsed human rights as a core principle of international security, committed countries to greater transparency in economic and military affairs, and promoted the freer movement of people and information across borders. Instead of restoring the legitimacy of the Soviet bloc, Helsinki established principles that undermined it. The definitive history of the origins and legacy of this important agreement, The Final Act shows how it served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War, and how, when that conflict finally came to a close, the great powers established a new international order based on Helsinki's enduring principles.

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Religious conversion is often associated with ideals of religious sincerity. But in a society in which religious belonging is entangled with ethnonational citizenship and confers political privilege, a convert might well have other motives. Over the last two decades, mass non-Jewish immigration to Israel, especially from the former Soviet Union, has sparked heated debates over the Jewish state's conversion policy and intensified suspicion of converts' sincerity. When the State Winks carefully traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion to challenge the assumption that Israel turns a blind eye to the bad faith of its subjects. Instead, it highlights the collaborative labor that goes into the making of the Israeli state and its Jewish citizens. In a rich ethnographic narrative based on fieldwork in conversion schools, rabbinic courts, and ritual bathhouses, Michal Kravel-Tovi follows conversion candidates-mostly secular young women from a former Soviet background-and state conversion agents caught between the contradictory demands of their nationalist and religious commitments. She complicates the popular perception that conversion is a "wink-wink" relationship in which both sides agree to treat the converts' pretenses of faith as real. Instead, she demonstrates how their interdependent performances blur any clear boundary between sincere and fraudulent conversions. Alongside detailed ethnography, Kravel-Tovi develops new ways to think about the complex connection between religious conversion and the nation-state. Kravel-Tovi emphasizes how state power is created and managed through "winking"-the subtle exchanges and performances that animate everyday encounters between state and citizen. In a country marked by tension between official religiosity and a predominantly secular Jewish population, winking permits the state to save its Jewish face.

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In 1941, the Jewish American writer and avant-garde icon Gertrude Stein embarked on one of the strangest intellectual projects of her life: translating for an American audience the speeches of Marshal Philippe Petain, head of state for the collaborationist Vichy government. From 1941 to 1943, Stein translated thirty-two of Petain's speeches, in which he outlined the Vichy policy barring Jews and other "foreign elements" from the public sphere while calling for France to reconcile with Nazi occupiers. Unlikely Collaboration pursues troubling questions: Why and under what circumstances would Stein undertake this project? The answers lie in Stein's link to the man at the core of this controversy: Bernard Fay, Stein's apparent Vichy protector. Fay was director of the Bibliotheque Nationale during the Vichy regime and overseer of the repression of French freemasons. He convinced Petain to keep Stein undisturbed during the war and, in turn, encouraged her to translate Petain for American audiences. Yet Fay's protection was not coercive. Stein described the thinker as her chief intellectual companion during her final years. Barbara Will outlines the formative powers of this relationship, noting possible affinities between Stein and Fay's political and aesthetic ideals, especially their reflection in Stein's writing from the late 1920s to the 1940s. Will treats their interaction as a case study of intellectual life during wartime France and an indication of America's place in the Vichy imagination. Her book forces a reconsideration of modernism and fascism, asking what led so many within the avant-garde toward fascist and collaborationist thought. Touching off a potential powder keg of critical dispute, Will replays a collaboration that proves essential to understanding fascism and the remaking of modern Europe.

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In the early 1900s, a sexual revolution took place that was to define social relations between the sexes in America for generations. As Victorian values gradually faded, and a commercialized consumer culture emerged, the female figure of the flapper came to embody early-twentieth century femininity. Simultaneously, masculine ideals were also undergoing radical change. Who then was this New Man to accompany the New Woman? Who was the flapper's boyfriend? In this remarkable book, Kevin White draws on a vast array of sources to examine the ideology—spread through movies, advertisements, sex confession magazines, social hygienists, sex manuals, and Freudian popularizers —that has defined modern American manhood. Examining attitudes toward masturbation, homosexuality, violence against women, feminism, free love, and the emerging dating system, The First Sexual Revolution shows how American men in the Jazz Age were subjected to a barrage of information and advice about their sexuality that stressed not character but personality and sex appeal. Repression was out; sexual expression—performance—was in. This New Man was more egalitarian and more sexual than the Victorian patriarch. But the diffusion to the middle class of the Victorian underworld ethos of primitivism and violence against women, and the flight from commitment to relationships, heralded instability and tensions that continues to define American sexual relations. To illustrate this point, Dr. White takes a close look—through letters and diaries—at the successes and failures of nine marriages involving actively feminist women, demonstrating the pressures that this revolution in values caused. Dr. White concludes that the return to primitivism characterized by the men's movement marks the most recent aftershock of the revolution that has shaped us all.

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“You sound like a white girl.” These were the words spoken to Julissa by a high school crush as she struggled to find her place in America. As a brown immigrant from Mexico, assimilation had been demanded of her since the moment she set foot in San Antonio, Texas, in 1994. She’d spent so much time getting rid of her accent so no one could tell English was her second language that in that moment she felt those words—you sound like a white girl?—were a compliment. As a child, she didn’t yet understand that assimilating to “American” culture really meant imitating “white” America—that sounding like a white girl was a racist idea meant to tame her, change her, and make her small. She ran the race, completing each stage, but never quite fit in, until she stopped running altogether. In this dual polemic and manifesto, Julissa dives into and tears apart the lie that assimilation leads to belonging. She combs through history and her own story to break down this myth, arguing that assimilation is a moving finish line designed to keep Black and brown Americans and immigrants chasing racist American ideals. She talks about the Lie of Success, the Lie of Legality, the Lie of Whiteness, and the Lie of English—each promising that if you obtain these things, you will reach acceptance and won’t be an outsider anymore. Julissa deftly argues that these demands leave her and those like her in a purgatory—neither able to secure the power and belonging within whiteness nor find it in the community and cultures whiteness demands immigrants and people of color leave behind.

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The first ever biography of the founder of Western philosophy Considered by many to be the most important philosopher ever, Plato was born into a well-to-do family in wartime Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE. In his teens, he honed his intellect by attending lectures from the many thinkers who passed through Athens and toyed with the idea of writing poetry. He finally decided to go into politics, but became disillusioned, especially after the Athenians condemned his teacher, Socrates, to death. Instead, Plato turned to writing and teaching. He began teaching in his twenties and later founded the Academy, the world's first higher-educational research and teaching establishment. Eventually, he returned to practical politics and spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to create a constitution for Syracuse in Sicily that would reflect and perpetuate some of his political ideals. The attempts failed, and Plato's disappointment can be traced in some of his later political works. In his lifetime and after, Plato was considered almost divine. Though a measure of his importance, this led to the invention of many tall tales about him-both by those who adored him and his detractors. In this first ever full-length portrait of Plato, Robin Waterfield steers a judicious course among these stories, debunking some while accepting the kernels of truth in others. He explains why Plato chose to write dialogues rather than treatises and gives an overview of the subject matter of all of Plato's books. Clearly and engagingly written throughout, Plato of Athens is the perfect introduction to the man and his work.

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