Search results for ""Author Dom"
Duke University Press Favored Flowers: Culture and Economy in a Global System
Billions of fresh-cut flowers are flown into the United States every year, allowing Americans to choose from a broad array of blooms regardless of the season. Favored Flowers is a lively investigation of the worldwide production and distribution of fresh-cut flowers and their consumption in the New York metropolitan area. In an ethnography filled with roses, orchids, and gerberas, flower auctions, new hybrids, and new logistical systems, Catherine Ziegler unravels the economic and cultural strands of the global flower market. She provides an historical overview of the development of the cut flower industry in New York from the late nineteenth century to 1970, and on to its ultimate transformation from a domestic to a global industry. As she points out, cut flowers serve no utilitarian purpose; rather, they signal consumers’ social and cultural decisions about expressing love, mourning, status, and identity. Ziegler shows how consumer behavior and choices have changed over time and how they are shaped by the media, by the types of available flowers, and by flower retailing. Ziegler interviewed more than 250 people as she followed flowers along the full length of the commodity chain, from cuttings in Europe and Latin America to vases in and around New York. She examines the daily experiences of flower growers in the Netherlands and Ecuador, two leading exporters of flowers to the United States. Primary focus, though, is on others in the commodity chain: exporters, importers, wholesalers, and retailers. She follows their activities as they respond to changing competition, supply, and consumer behavior in a market characterized by risk, volatility, and imperfect knowledge. By tracing changes in the wholesale and retail systems, she shows the recent development of two complementary commodity chains in New York and the United States generally. One leads to a high-end luxury market served by specialty florists and designers, and the other to a lower-priced mass market served by chain groceries, corner delis, and retail superstores.
£80.10
Ohio University Press Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana
A robust historical case study that demonstrates how village development became central to the rhetoric and practice of statecraft in rural Ghana. Combining oral histories with decades of archival material, Village Work formulates a sweeping history of twentieth-century statecraft that centers on the daily work of rural people, local officials, and family networks, rather than on the national governments and large-scale plans that often dominate development stories. Wiemers shows that developmentalism was not simply created by governments and imposed on the governed; instead, it was jointly constructed through interactions between them. The book contributes to the historiographies of development and statecraft in Africa and the Global South by emphasizing the piecemeal, contingent, and largely improvised ways both development and the state are comprised and experiencedproviding new entry points into longstanding discussions about developmental power and discourseunsettling common ideas about how and by whom states are madeexposing the importance of unpaid labor in mediating relationships between governments and the governedshowing how state engagement could both exacerbate and disrupt inequitiesDespite massive changes in twentieth-century political structures—the imposition and destruction of colonial rule, nationalist plans for pan-African solidarity and modernization, multiple military coups, and the rise of neoliberal austerity policies—unremunerated labor and demonstrations of local leadership have remained central tools by which rural Ghanaians have interacted with the state. Grounding its analysis of statecraft in decades of daily negotiations over budgets and bureaucracy, the book tells the stories of developers who decided how and where projects would be sited, of constituents who performed labor, and of a chief and his large cadre of educated children who met and shaped demands for local leaders. For a variety of actors, invoking “the village” became a convenient way to allocate or attract limited resources, to highlight or downplay struggles over power, and to forge national and international networks.
£27.99
University of Minnesota Press The Art of Making Do in Naples
“In Naples, there are more singers than there are unemployed people.” These words echo through the neomelodica music scene, a vast undocumented economy animated by wedding singers, pirate TV, and tens of thousands of fans throughout southern Italy and beyond. In a city with chronic unemployment, this setting has attracted hundreds of aspiring singers trying to make a living—or even a fortune. In the process, they brush up against affiliates of the region’s violent organized crime networks, the camorra. In The Art of Making Do in Naples, Jason Pine explores the murky neomelodica music scene and finds himself on uncertain ground.The “art of making do” refers to the informal and sometimes illicit entrepreneurial tactics of some Neapolitans who are pursuing a better life for themselves and their families. In the neomelodica music scene, the art of making do involves operating do-it-yourself recording studios and performing at the private parties of crime bosses. It can also require associating with crime boss-impresarios who guarantee their success by underwriting it with extortion, drug trafficking, and territorial influence. Pine, likewise “making do,” gradually realized that the completion of his ethnographic work also depended on the aid of forbidding figures.The Art of Making Do in Naples offers a riveting ethnography of the lives of men who seek personal sovereignty in a shadow economy dominated, in incalculable ways, by the camorra. Pine navigates situations suffused with secrecy, moral ambiguity, and fears of ruin that undermine the anthropologist’s sense of autonomy. Making his way through Naples’s spectacular historic center and outer slums, on the trail of charmingly evasive neomelodici singers and unsettlingly elusive camorristi, Pine himself becomes a music video director and falls into the orbit of a shadowy music promoter who may or may not be a camorra affiliate.Pine’s trenchant observations and his own improvised attempts at “making do” provide a fascinating look into the lives of people in the gray zones where organized crime blends into ordinary life.
£21.99
New York University Press At Home with Pornography: Women, Sexuality, and Everyday Life
Twenty-five years after the start of the feminist sex wars, pornography remains a flashpoint issue, with feminists locked in a familiar argument: Are women victims or agents? In At Home with Pornography, Jane Juffer exposes the fruitlessness of this debate and suggests that it has prevented us from realizing women's changing relationship to erotica and porn. Over the course of these same twenty-five years, there has been a proliferation of sexually explicit materials geared toward women, made available in increasingly mainstream venues. In asking "what is the relationship of women to pornography?" Juffer maintains that we need to stop obsessing over pornography's transgressive aspects, and start focusing on the place of porn and erotica in women's everyday lives. Where, she asks, do women routinely find it, for how much, and how is it circulated and consumed within the home? How is this circulation and consumption shaped by the different marketing categories that attempt to distinguish erotica from porn, such as women's literary erotica and sexual self-help videos for couples? At Home with Pornography responds to these questions by viewing women's erotica within the context of governmental regulation that attempts to counterpose a "dangerous" pornography with the sanctity of the home. Juffer explorers how women's consumption of erotica and porn for their own pleasure can be empowering, while still acting to reinforce conservative ideals. She shows how, for instance, the Victoria's Secret catalog is able to function as a kind of pornography whose circulation is facilitated both by its reliance on Victorian themes of secrecy and privacy and on its appeals to the selfish pleasures of modern career women. In her pursuit to understand what women like and how they get it, Juffer delves into adult cable channels, erotic literary anthologies, sex therapy guides, cyberporn, masturbation, and sex toys, showing the varying degrees to which these materials have been domesticated for home consumption. Representing the next generation of scholarship on pornography, At Home with Pornography will transform our understanding of women's everyday sexuality.
£23.99
Taylor & Francis Inc Internet Guide to Pet Health
With the staggering amount of pet health information available on the Internet, it is often difficult to find exactly what you are looking for. The Internet Guide to Pet Health is a one-stop guide that weeds through all the clutter to bring you only the most dependable sources and relevant content. This comprehensive compilation of annotated links will serve as a handy, useful, and easy-to-consult guide for persons who appreciate animals and/or own domestic pets of all kinds, especially cats and dogs. This text also features a full glossary of medical terms, bibliography, and a quick-find index.The health needs of pet animals have become as complex and specialized as those of humans. Pet owners, veterinarians, and animal lovers alike need authoritative, reliable, and up-to-date information about caring for the health and well-being of pets. The Internet Guide to Pet Health offers a quick, easy, and comprehensive reference to quality Web sites that focus on the health and welfare of animal companions. The Internet Guide to Pet Health will help you pinpoint reliable information on: • the health benefits of pet ownership • diseases transmitted by pets • pet food safety • animal care and welfare societies and organizations • death, dying, and euthanasia • poisons, dangerous situations, and other hazards • spaying and neutering • traveling with pets • pet-specific care for dogs, cats, small animals, and fish • surgery, surgical procedures, and hospitalization • exercise and training • dental care, diet, and nutrition • disabled pets • service and therapy animals • and much, much more! The Internet Guide to Pet Health is an ideal resource for anyone who is directly involved in the lives of pet companions or simply an animal lover. Medical librarians in academic medical centers and teaching hospitals; consumer health and public librarians; veterinarians and veterinary clinic staff; public health personnel; animal trainers; and groomers will also find this to be an invaluable text.
£32.99
John Wiley and Sons Ltd High Society in the Third Reich
This book is the first systematic study of the relations between German high society and the Nazis. It uses unpublished archival material, private diaries and diplomatic documents to take us into the hidden areas of power where privileges, tax breaks, and stolen property were exchanged. Fabrice D'Almeida begins by examining high society in the Weimar period, dominated by the old imperial aristocracy and a new republican aristocracy of government officials and wealthy businessmen. It was in this group that Hitler made his social debut in the early 1920s through the mediation of conservative friends and artists, including the family of the composer Richard Wagner. By the end of the 1920s, he enjoyed wide support among socialites, who played a significant role in his access to power in 1933. Their adherence to the Nazi regime, and the favors they received in return, continued and even grew until defeat loomed on the horizon. D'Almeida shows how members of German high society sought to outdo each other in showing zealous support for Hitler, how the old elites starting with the Kaiser's sons partied alongside parvenus, and how actors, aristocrats, SS technocrats, and diplomats came together to form a strange imperial court. Women also played a role in this theatre of power; they were persuaded that they had gained in dignity what they had lost in civil rights. There emerges a fascinating and disturbing picture of a group that allowed nothing - not war, the plundering of Europe, nor the extermination of peoples - to alter their cynical enjoyment of pleasures: hunting, regattas, the opera, balls, dinners and tennis. More than a study of a class or a chronicle, this book lifts the veil that has concealed a society that used secrecy to protect itself. High Society in the Third Reich makes an important and unique contribution to the current reevaluation of the extent to which German society, including German high society, was responsible for Hitler's accession to power and the crimes that were committed by his regime.
£19.99
Princeton University Press The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865
A groundbreaking history of early America that shows how Boston built and sustained an independent city-state in New England before being folded into the United StatesIn the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston’s development over three centuries, Mark Peterson discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain’s Stuart monarchs and how—through its bargain with the slave trade and ratification of the Constitution—it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States.Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar figures alongside well-known ones, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston’s origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain’s empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, “Bostoners” aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston’s regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state’s vision of a common good for all.Peeling away the layers of myth surrounding a revered city, The City-State of Boston offers a startlingly fresh understanding of America’s history.
£31.50
Hachette Books Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America
Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America uncovers a hidden history of the biggest psychedelic distribution and belief system the world has ever known. Through a collection of fast-paced interlocking narratives, it animates the tale of an alternate America and its wide-eyed citizens: the LSD-slinging graffiti writers of Central Park, the Dead-loving AI scientists of Stanford, utopian Whole Earth homesteaders, black market chemists, government-wanted Anonymous hackers, rogue explorers, East Village bluegrass pickers, spiritual seekers, Internet pioneers, entrepreneurs, pranksters, pioneering DJs, and a nation of Deadheads.WFMU DJ and veteran music writer Jesse Jarnow draws on extensive new firsthand accounts from many never-before-interviewed subjects and a wealth of deep archival research to create a comic-book-colored and panoramic American landscape, taking readers for a guided tour of the hippie highway filled with lit-up explorers, peak trips, big busts, and scenic vistas, from Vermont to the Pacific Northwest, from the old world head capitals of San Francisco and New York to the geodesic dome-dotted valleys of Colorado and New Mexico. And with the psychedelic research moving into the mainstream for the first time in decades, Heads also recounts the story of the quiet entheogenic revolution that for years has been brewing resiliently in the Dead's Technicolor shadow.Featuring over four dozen images, many never before seen--including pop artist Keith Haring's first publicly sold work--Heads weaves one of the 20th and 21st centuries' most misunderstood subcultures into the fabric of the nation's history. Written for anyone who wondered what happened to the heads after the Acid Tests, through the '70s, during the Drug War, and on to the psychedelic present, Heads collects the essential history of how LSD, Deadheads, tie-dye, and the occasional bad trip have become familiar features of the American experience.
£18.99
Columbia University Press CBS’s Don Hollenbeck: An Honest Reporter in the Age of McCarthyism
Loren Ghiglione recounts the fascinating life and tragic suicide of Don Hollenbeck, the controversial newscaster who became a primary target of McCarthyism's smear tactics. Drawing on unsealed FBI records, private family correspondence, and interviews with Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Charles Collingwood, Douglas Edwards, and more than one hundred other journalists, Ghiglione writes a balanced biography that cuts close to the bone of this complicated newsman and chronicles the stark consequences of the anti-Communist frenzy that seized America in the late 1940s and 1950s. Hollenbeck began his career at the Lincoln, Nebraska Journal (marrying the boss's daughter) before becoming an editor at William Randolph Hearst's rip-roaring Omaha Bee-News. He participated in the emerging field of photojournalism at the Associated Press; assisted in creating the innovative, ad-free PM newspaper in New York City; reported from the European theater for NBC radio during World War II; and anchored television newscasts at CBS during the era of Edward R. Murrow. Hollenbeck's pioneering, prize-winning radio program, CBS Views the Press (1947-1950), was a declaration of independence from a print medium that had dominated American newsmaking for close to 250 years. The program candidly criticized the prestigious New York Times, the Daily News (then the paper with the largest circulation in America), and Hearst's flagship Journal-American and popular morning tabloid Daily Mirror. For this honest work, Hollenbeck was attacked by conservative anti-Communists, especially Hearst columnist Jack O'Brian, and in 1954, plagued by depression, alcoholism, three failed marriages, and two network firings (and worried about a third), Hollenbeck took his own life. In his investigation of this amazing American character, Ghiglione reveals the workings of an industry that continues to fall victim to censorship and political manipulation. Separating myth from fact, CBS's Don Hollenbeck is the definitive portrait of a polarizing figure who became a symbol of America's tortured conscience.
£25.20
HarperCollins Publishers Inc Rock Me on the Water: 1974--the Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics
"An electric story filled with gripping personalities, compelling backstage histories, and a clear message for the divided America of today: the forces that fear change can win for a time, but in America the future always gets the last word. A lyrical recreation of a magical moment.”—Jake TapperNow in paperback, an exceptional cultural history from Atlantic Senior Editor Ronald Brownstein—“one of America's best political journalists” (The Economist)—tells the kaleidoscopic story of one monumental year that marked the city of Los Angeles’ creative peak, a glittering moment when popular culture was ahead of politics in predicting what America would become. Los Angeles in 1974 exerted more influence over popular culture than any other city in America. Los Angeles that year, in fact, dominated popular culture more than it ever had before, or would again. Working in film, recording, and television studios around Sunset Boulevard, living in Brentwood and Beverly Hills or amid the flickering lights of the Hollywood Hills, a cluster of transformative talents produced an explosion in popular culture which reflected the demographic, social, and cultural realities of a changing America. At a time when Richard Nixon won two presidential elections with a message of backlash against the social changes unleashed by the sixties, popular culture was ahead of politics in predicting what America would become. The early 1970s in Los Angeles was the time and the place where conservatives definitively lost the battle to control popular culture.Rock Me on the Water traces the confluence of movies, music, television, and politics in Los Angeles month by month through that transformative, magical year. Ronald Brownstein reveals how 1974 represented a confrontation between a massive younger generation intent on change, and a political order rooted in the status quo. Today, we are again witnessing a generational cultural divide. Brownstein shows how the voices resistant to change may win the political battle for a time, but they cannot hold back the future.
£12.99
Everyman Marco Polo Travels
Marco Polo set off on his travels from Venice as a young man in 1271, and returned home in 1295 after spending 24 years away, 17 of them in China. He isone of the few early adventurers whose name nearly everyone knows. His book was one of the best-loved works of the Middle Ages, and has remained popular ever since. At a time when China is again assuming global importance, his account of China under the Mongol emperor Khubilai Khan - the dazzlingly splendid capital in Beijing, the great southern metropolis of Hangzhou - is a classic reminder of the antiquity of Chinese power and civilization.Marco Polo also portrays countries and cities all along the trade route from the Mediterranean to Mongolia. He reminds us that Iraq's present suffering is not unique by relating the story of the attack on Baghdad by Mongol forces in 1258. He conveys the daunting prospect of the deserts of central Asia and the distant charms of Yunnan. And he reminds us of the huge merchant ships dominating China's trade with foreign countries, ships that far outstripped their European counterparts. He even writes about Japan, the first European to do so. His book was often thought of as a book of marvels, but one of its striking features to a contemporary reader is its clarity, realism and tolerance. As this new edition shows, he sometimes exaggerates, but his reputation for making things up is quite unfair, as Colin Thubron makes clear in his introduction. The original manuscript of Marco Polo's book is lost, and in the many later versions names and other details have become so garbled that it has been said that his itineraries are impossible to follow. This new Everyman edition shows this need not be so. It explains clearly all the references in the book, and shows in detail with new maps the routes described from Venice to Beijing, from Beijing to Burma, and from Beijing to south-east China. It also provides an up-to-date history of the book and the controversies surrounding it.
£15.99
Archaeopress Man and Bird in the Palaeolithic of Western Europe
Man and Bird in the Palaeolithic of Western Europe considers the nature of the interaction between birds and hunter-gatherers. It examines aspects of avian behaviour and the qualities that could be (and were) targeted at different periods by hunter-gatherers, who recognised the utility of the diversity of avian groups in various applications of daily life and thought. It is clear from the records of excavated sites in western Europe that during the evolution of both the Neanderthal period and the subsequent occupations of Homo sapiens, avian demographics fluctuated with the climate along with other aspects of both flora and fauna. Each was required to adapt to these changes. The present study considers these changes through the interactions of man and bird as evidenced in the remains attached to Middle and Upper Palaeolithic occupation sites in western Europe and touches on a variety of prey/predator relationships across other groups of plant and animal species. The book describes a range of procurement strategies that are known from the literature and artistic record of later cultures to have been used in the trapping, enticement and hunting of birds for consumption and the manufacture of weapons, domestic items, clothing, ceremony and cultural activities. It also explores how bird images and depictions engraved or painted on the walls of caves or on the objects of daily use during the Upper Palaeolithic may be perceived as communications of a more profound significance for the temporal, seasonal or social life of the members of the group than the simple concept of animal. Certain bird species have at different times held a special significance in the everyday consciousness of particular peoples and a group of Late Glacial, Magdalenian settlements in Aquitaine, France, appear to be an example of such specialised culling. A case study of the treatment of snowy owl at Arancou in the Atlantic Pyrenees seems to illustrate such a specialisation. Discussion of the problems of reconciling dating and research methods, of the last two hundred years of Palaeolithic research, and of possible directions for future research offer an open conclusion to the work.
£44.48
Transworld Publishers Ltd Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
**WINNER of the PULITZER PRIZE for NON-FICTION 2016**In a thrilling dramatic narrative, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread to become the world's greatest threat. When the government of Jordan granted amnesty to a group of political prisoners in 1999, it little realized that among them was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist mastermind and soon the architect of an Islamist movement bent on dominating the Middle East. In Black Flags, an unprecedented character-driven account of the rise of ISIS, Joby Warrick shows how the zeal of this one man and the strategic mistakes of Western governments led to the banner of ISIS being raised over huge swathes of Syria and Iraq. Zarqawi began by directing terror attacks from a base in northern Iraq, but it was the allied invasion in 2003 that catapulted him to the head of a vast insurgency. By falsely identifying him as the link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, Western officials inadvertently spurred like-minded radicals to rally to his cause. Their wave of brutal beheadings and suicide bombings persisted until American and Jordanian intelligence discovered clues that led to a lethal airstrike on Zarqawi’s hideout in 2006. His movement, however, endured. First calling themselves al-Qaeda in Iraq, then Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, his followers sought refuge in unstable, ungoverned pockets on the Iraq-Syria border. When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, and the rest of the world largely stood by, ISIS seized its chance to pursue Zarqawi’s dream of an ultra-conservative Islamic caliphate. Drawing on unique high-level access to global intelligence sources, Warrick weaves gripping, moment-by-moment operational details with the perspectives of diplomats and spies, generals and heads of state, many of whom foresaw a menace worse than al Qaeda and tried desperately to stop it. Black Flags is a brilliant and definitive history that reveals the long arc of today’s most dangerous extremist threat.
£12.99
Facet Publishing Portals: People, Processes, Technology
First applied to internet gateways such as Yahoo, the concept of the 'portal' has evolved in a bewildering number of directions. Different themes of personalization, aggregation or integration seem to have dominated our understanding of what a portal should be at different times. Many organizations and institutions have borrowed the idea from the net to address local problems of integrating and presenting information sources to users - yet they have developed the concept in different ways. Meanwhile new models seem to be constantly emerging from the internet. Tracking this evolving concept is clearly of particular concern for information services. How can they best take advantage of internet portals to improve access to resources? What are the requirements for delivery of diverse content through a local portal? And how do portals run by libraries relate to wider organizational initiatives? This edited collection seeks answers to these questions, providing the library and broader information community with an overview of how portals are currently being used. Leading edge researchers and practitioners explore the variety of ways in which the aspiration to portalize information is currently being realized and offer several views on likely future trends. The book is divided into five sections: Section 1 discusses generic aspects of portals such as questions of definition, as well as exploring the underlying technologies and overarching management issues, and the concepts of personalization and user needs analysis. Section 2 focuses on the role of information services in developing portals. Sections 3 and 4 analyse the current experience of portals within the corporate, public and academic sectors, with case studies and reviews of sector trends Section 5 offers various perspectives on the future development of the concept of the portal. Readership: This is an invaluable book for the growing numbers of information practitioners interested in developing or contributing to a portal, and those supporting users of portals. It will also be useful to students of information management seeking to increase their understanding of how the concept of the portal is being realized in the information world.
£69.95
Duke University Press Favored Flowers: Culture and Economy in a Global System
Billions of fresh-cut flowers are flown into the United States every year, allowing Americans to choose from a broad array of blooms regardless of the season. Favored Flowers is a lively investigation of the worldwide production and distribution of fresh-cut flowers and their consumption in the New York metropolitan area. In an ethnography filled with roses, orchids, and gerberas, flower auctions, new hybrids, and new logistical systems, Catherine Ziegler unravels the economic and cultural strands of the global flower market. She provides an historical overview of the development of the cut flower industry in New York from the late nineteenth century to 1970, and on to its ultimate transformation from a domestic to a global industry. As she points out, cut flowers serve no utilitarian purpose; rather, they signal consumers’ social and cultural decisions about expressing love, mourning, status, and identity. Ziegler shows how consumer behavior and choices have changed over time and how they are shaped by the media, by the types of available flowers, and by flower retailing. Ziegler interviewed more than 250 people as she followed flowers along the full length of the commodity chain, from cuttings in Europe and Latin America to vases in and around New York. She examines the daily experiences of flower growers in the Netherlands and Ecuador, two leading exporters of flowers to the United States. Primary focus, though, is on others in the commodity chain: exporters, importers, wholesalers, and retailers. She follows their activities as they respond to changing competition, supply, and consumer behavior in a market characterized by risk, volatility, and imperfect knowledge. By tracing changes in the wholesale and retail systems, she shows the recent development of two complementary commodity chains in New York and the United States generally. One leads to a high-end luxury market served by specialty florists and designers, and the other to a lower-priced mass market served by chain groceries, corner delis, and retail superstores.
£25.19
Open University Press Qualitative Psychology
“An introduction to the varieties of qualitative research in psychology is long overdue, and Parker’s book should with its broad scope, accessible style, and controversial viewpoints on trends of the current qualitative wave, have a wide audience.” Steinar Kvale, Aarhus University, Denmark“This is a wonderful, insightful and necessary book…It takes students through this complex terrain in a clear, readable and yet challenging way.”Bronwyn Davies, University of Western Sydney, Australia“This book makes important contributions to theoretical, political and methodological debates on qualitative and action oriented research.”Bernardo Jiménez-Domínguez, Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico"For me personally, the book worked very well, I very much appreciated the fact that the book went beyond a presentation of 'the state of the art', and that it offered new ideas and suggestions about how to take qualitative research further."Qualitative Research in PsychologyThis book is designed as a practical guide for students that is also grounded in the latest developments in theory in psychology. Readers are introduced to theoretical approaches to ethnography, interviewing, narrative, discourse and psychoanalysis, with each chapter on these approaches including worked examples clearly structured around methodological stages. A case is made for new practical procedures that encourage students to question the limits of mainstream psychological research methods. Resource links guide students to theoretical debates and to ways of making these debates relevant to a psychology genuinely concerned with critical reflection and social change. The book includes numerous boxes that clearly outline: Key issues in the development, application and assessment of qualitative research methods Current debates and problems with particular qualitative methods taught in psychology Summaries of methodological stages and points to be aware of in the marking of practical reports in relation to specific methods Coverage of ethical issues, reflexivity and good report writing Qualitative Psychology is essential reading for students of psychology and other related social sciences who want a polemical account that will also serve as a well-balanced and rigorous introduction to current debates in qualitative psychology.
£31.99
Oxbow Books The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia
Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are among the most common themes of the great medieval Icelandic sagas and poems, the problematic yet vital sources that provide our primary textual evidence for the Viking Age that they claim to describe. Yet despite the consistency of this picture, surprisingly little archaeological or historical research has been done to explore what this may really have meant to the men and women of the time. This book examines the evidence for Old Norse sorcery, looking at its meaning and function, practice and practitioners, and the complicated constructions of gender and sexual identity with which these were underpinned. Combining strong elements of eroticism and aggression, sorcery appears as a fundamental domain of women's power, linking them with the gods, the dead and the future. Their battle spells and combat rituals complement the men's physical acts of fighting, in a supernatural empowerment of the Viking way of life. What emerges is a fundamentally new image of the world in which the Vikings understood themselves to move, in which magic and its implications permeated every aspect of a society permanently geared for war. In this fully-revised and expanded second edition, Neil Price takes us with him on a tour through the sights and sounds of this undiscovered country, meeting its human and otherworldly inhabitants, including the Sámi with whom the Norse partly shared this mental landscape. On the way we explore Viking notions of the mind and soul, the fluidity of the boundaries that they drew between humans and animals, and the immense variety of their spiritual beliefs. We find magic in the Vikings' bedrooms and on their battlefields, and we meet the sorcerers themselves through their remarkable burials and the tools of their trade. Combining archaeology, history and literary scholarship with extensive studies of Germanic and circumpolar religion, this multi-award-winning book shows us the Vikings as we have never seen them before.
£35.00
University of Texas Press Amazigh Arts in Morocco: Women Shaping Berber Identity
In southeastern Morocco, around the oasis of Tafilalet, the Ait Khabbash people weave brightly colored carpets, embroider indigo head coverings, paint their faces with saffron, and wear ornate jewelry. Their extraordinarily detailed arts are rich in cultural symbolism; they are always breathtakingly beautiful—and they are typically made by women. Like other Amazigh (Berber) groups (but in contrast to the Arab societies of North Africa), the Ait Khabbash have entrusted their artistic responsibilities to women. Cynthia Becker spent years in Morocco living among these women and, through family connections and female fellowship, achieved unprecedented access to the artistic rituals of the Ait Khabbash. The result is more than a stunning examination of the arts themselves, it is also an illumination of women's roles in Islamic North Africa and the many ways in which women negotiate complex social and religious issues.One of the reasons Amazigh women are artists is that the arts are expressions of ethnic identity, and it follows that the guardians of Amazigh identity ought to be those who literally ensure its continuation from generation to generation, the Amazigh women. Not surprisingly, the arts are visual expressions of womanhood, and fertility symbols are prevalent. Controlling the visual symbols of Amazigh identity has given these women power and prestige. Their clothing, tattoos, and jewelry are public identity statements; such public artistic expressions contrast with the stereotype that women in the Islamic world are secluded and veiled. But their role as public identity symbols can also be restrictive, and history (French colonialism, the subsequent rise of an Arab-dominated government in Morocco, and the recent emergence of a transnational Berber movement) has forced Ait Khabbash women to adapt their arts as their people adapt to the contemporary world. By framing Amazigh arts with historical and cultural context, Cynthia Becker allows the reader to see the full measure of these fascinating artworks.
£19.99
Transworld Publishers Ltd Open the Cage, Murphy!: Hilarious tales of the rise of Lily Savage
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'With typical razor-sharp wit and candour, Paul tells of his rise to fame as Lily Savage . . . Riveting.' Daily MirrorFrom Britain's most beloved TV star, Open the Cage, Murphy is an action-packed roller-coaster ride through a decade of Paul O'Grady's life, stuffed full to the gunwales with hilarious stories, extreme situations and outrageous one-liners.A must read for any Paul O'Grady fan, Open the Cage, Murphy follows his brilliant comic creation Lily Savage as she embraces success and world domination beckons.From being involved in a plane crash, to getting caught up in the LA riots and a close encounter with Madonna, the stories come thick and fast. Paul takes us with him to a gay-themed weekend in Butlin's in Skegness, on a rowdy tour with Prisoner Cell Block H - the Musical and into the depths of the Australian rainforest, where he befriends a rare bird that can disembowel a man with a single kick. The dramatis personae include a family of dolphins, Charlton Heston and the ghost of Joan of Arc - and there's a starring role for a certain remarkable dog, Buster Elvis Savage.But whether he's writing about star-studded Hollywood parties, the devastating loss of close friends to AIDS, or late night shenanigans at the end of Blackpool Pier, Paul's wit and humanity never desert him.Open the Cage, Murphy is a genuine delight - all the more so for being delightfully genuine.Readers love Open the Cage, Murphy!' I couldn't put it down . . . Paul comes across as a very intelligent man . . . with a heart of gold under that naughty exterior.' *****'This is such a great read, Paul is excellent when describing things makes you feel as though you are there with him. His humour warmth and caring comes out in abundance.' *****'An excellent read. He takes you through the highs and lows of his life, you laugh and cry with him.' *****
£10.99
Oxford University Press Inc Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for Their States' Wrongdoings?
States are often held responsible for their wrongdoings. States pay compensation for their unjust wars, as did Iraq in the aftermath of its invasion of Kuwait. States pay reparations for their historical wrongdoings, as did Chile to the victims of the Pinochet Regime, or Germany to Israel and other countries because of the Holocaust. Some argue that they should pay punitive damages for their international crimes as well. But state responsibility has a troubling feature: states are corporate agents, comprising flesh and blood citizens. When they turn to the public purse to finance their corporate liabilities, it is their citizens who pay the price. Even citizens who protested against their state's policies, did not know about them, or had no influence on policy makers end up sharing the burden. Why should these citizens pay for their state's wrongdoings, if they don't carry the blame? Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States develops a fresh justification for citizens' duties to share the burden of their state's wrongdoings. This justification revolves around citizens' participation in their state: drawing on recent debates in the philosophy of collective action, Avia Pasternak shows that citizens are acting together in their state and that their state policies are the product of this collective action. Given this participation, citizens ought to share the burden of remedying harmful wrongs their state policies bring about. However, she also argues that not all citizens in all states are participating in their state. In many authoritarian states, citizens' participation in the state is highly restricted or coerced. Here, ordinary citizens do not share responsibility for their state policies and should not be forced to pay for them. These conclusions carry significant real-world implications for the way domestic international law holds various types of states, and their citizens, responsible for their wrongdoings. This work is essential for political theorists and philosophers grappling with citizen responsibility and duty.
£71.51
Penguin Books Ltd The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market
'A brilliantly readable account, based on exceptional access, of the transformation of the old Quaker bank into a hard-charging capitalist adventurer ... both a thriller and a reminder that business is fascinating because all human life is there' John Plender, Financial TimesBased on unparalleled access to those involved, and told with compelling pace and drama, The Bank that Lived a Little describes three decades of boardroom intrigue at one of Britain's biggest financial institutions. In a tale of feuds, grandiose dreams and a struggle for supremacy between rival strategies and their adherents, Philip Augar gives a riveting account of Barclays' journey from an old Quaker bank to a full-throttle capitalist machine. The disagreement between those ambitious for Barclays to join the top table of global banks, and those preferring a smaller domestic role more in keeping with the bank's traditions, cost three chief executives their jobs and continues to divide opinion within Barclays, the City and beyond.This is an extraordinary corporate thriller, which among much else describes how Barclays came to buy Lehman Brothers for a bargain price in 2008, why it was so keen to avoid taking government funding during the financial crisis, and the price shareholders have paid for a decade of barely controlled ambition. But Augar also shows how Barclays' experiences are a paradigm for Britain's social and economic life over thirty years, which saw the City move from the edge of the economy to its very centre. These decades created unprecedented prosperity for a tiny number, and made the reputations of governments and individuals but then left many of them in tatters.The leveraged society, the winner-takes-all mentality and our present era of austerity can all be traced to the influence of banks such as Barclays. Augar's book tells this rollercoaster story from the perspective of many of its participants - and also of those affected by the grip they came to have on Britain.
£14.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire
WINNER OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE A SPECTATOR, WATERSTONES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE, PROSPECT AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR A profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century. ‘A triumph of writing and scholarship. It is hard to imagine anyone ever bettering Das's account of this part of the story’ - William Dalrymple, Financial Times ‘A fascinating glimpse of the origins of the British Empire . . . drawn in dazzling technicolour’ - Spectator ‘Beautifully written and masterfully researched, this has the makings of a classic’ - Peter Frankopan SHORTLISTED FOR THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA CROWN AWARDS When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. A major debut that explores the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, Courting India reveals Thomas Roe's time in the Mughal Empire to be a turning point in history – and offers a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire.
£27.00
HarperCollins Publishers Behind Her Eyes
Don’t miss the brand new twisty thriller from Sarah Pinborough – INSOMNIA – available to buy now! Don’t Trust This Book Don’t Trust These People Don’t Trust Yourself And whatever you do, DON’T give away that ending… ***Now a major new Netflix series*** Louise Since her husband walked out, Louise has made her son her world, supporting them both with her part-time job. But all that changes when she meets… David Young, successful and charming – Louise cannot believe a man like him would look at her twice let alone be attracted to her. But that all comes to a grinding halt when she meets his wife… Adele Beautiful, elegant and sweet – Louise's new friend seems perfect in every way. As she becomes obsessed by this flawless couple, entangled in the intricate web of their marriage, they each, in turn, reach out to her. But only when she gets to know them both does she begin to see the cracks… Is David really the man she thought she knew and is Adele as vulnerable as she appears?Just what terrible secrets are they both hiding and how far will they go to keep them? 'Bloody brilliant' Stephen King ‘Piledriver domestic thriller with pull-the-rug-out ending’ Ian Rankin (on Twitter) ‘A dark, electrifying page-turner with a corker of an ending’ Harlan Coben ‘This year’s must-read thriller’ Evening Standard ‘The most unsettling thriller of the year… Read it now before someone spoils the ending for you’ John Connolly ‘Everyone will be talking about this book’ Stylist ‘Masterful writing that crackles with tension, before detonating that ending’ Angela Clarke ‘One of the best endings to a book’ Prima ‘Just when you think you’ve nailed it, Pinborough pulls the rug out from underneath you’ Sam Baker ‘The ending's a shocker that makes you want to read the novel all over again’ Woman and Home
£9.99
Sounds True Inc Divine Rebels: Saints, Mystics, Holy Change Agents--and You
A Compelling Guide to the Ultimate Spiritual Revolution They rose up to challenge the status quo and shake the foundations of our world. Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Mother Mary, and divine rebels throughout the ages—their true legacy is not what they did in their time on earth, but the eternal beacon that they held up for each of us to follow. On Divine Rebels, Caroline Myss and Andrew Harvey offer you an opportunity and a challenge—to listen for the same divine voice that called to history's greatest spiritual trailblazers, and to answer it in your own life. Essential Training for an Insurgency of Truth and Love "If you are ready to put your soul in charge of your life instead of your ego, you are ready for your own rebellion," teaches Caroline Myss. Inspired by mystics such as Rumi, Sri Aurobindo, and Saint John of the Cross, Myss and Harvey have created a map for the journey to your own awakening. The first stage, they teach, is to overthrow the harmful and false beliefs we hold about ourselves—that we are small, unworthy, and isolated from the divine. Once you have grasped that revolutionary idea, you can begin to usurp the dominion of the ego and overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of your true purpose. Every one of us will hear the call in our lives—a drive to act that starts with the soul and expresses itself as a radical transformation in the way we live. The lesson of the divine rebel is that when we offer ourselves wholly to do what the divine asks of us, the power of grace will come flooding into our lives. Divine Rebels is a training course in finding the inspiration and courage to answer your own call—and discover for yourself why the ultimate rebellion is love. Music by Jon Samson HIGHLIGHTS Untold stories of saints, sages, and mystics—what we can learn from their struggles and triumphs • Honoring the great "yes"—the convergence of the sacred masculine and sacred feminine in our time • How spontaneous healings and miracles are an act of defiance—and what they defy • Why a mystic must be willing to challenge the divine—and to completely surrender • The steps of initiation to becoming a divine rebel • Love and truth—the essential pillars of a spiritual revolution • The dark night of the soul—how this spiritual crucible burns away the blockages between who we are and what we can be • Rumi and Shams, John and Teresa—the evolutionary nature of divine rebel partnerships • More than nine hours of fierce wisdom, revelatory teachings, and compassionate guidance for our soul's most transformative journey Course objectives: Discuss the steps of initiation in becoming a divine rebel, including more than one dark night of the soul, preparing you to walk a path of truth and love for the ultimate spiritual revolution. • Observe stories of saints, sages, and mystics—including the evolutionary nature of divine rebel partnerships--and learn from both their struggles and triumphs. • Summarize the value of the convergence of the sacred masculine and sacred feminine in our time. • Observe fierce wisdom, revelatory teachings, and compassionate guidance for your soul's most transformative journey.
£63.00
St Augustine's Press Homo Americanus – The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy in America
What is the man who cannot be known apart from his socio-political environment? As Zbigniew Janowski asserts, one does not ask who this man is, for he does not even know himself. This man is suppressed and separated, and not by Fascism or Communism. In present-day America this has been accomplished by democracy. “Only someone shortsighted, or someone who values equality more than freedom, would deny that today’s citizens enjoy little or no freedom, particularly freedom of speech, and even less the ability to express openly or publicly the opinions that are not in conformity with what the majority considers acceptable at a given moment. It may sound paradoxical to contemporary ears, but a fight against totalitarianism must also mean a fight against the expansion of democracy.” Janowski all at once brazen and out of bounds states what he calls the obvious and unthinkable truth: In the United States, we are already living in a totalitarian reality. The American citizen, the Homo Americanus, is an ideological being who is no longer good or bad, reasonable or irrational, proper or improper except when measured against the objectives of the dominating egalitarian mentality that American democracy has successfully incubated. American democracy has done what other despotic regimes have likewise achieved––namely, taken hold of the individual and forced him to renounce (or forget) his greatness, pursuit of virtue and his orientation toward history and Tradition. Homo Americanus, Janowski argues, has no mind or soul and he cannot tolerate diversity and indeed he now censors himself. Democracy is not benign, and we should fear its principles come by and applied ad hoc. It is deeply troublesome that in the way democracy moves today it gives critics no real insight into any trajectory of reason behind its motion, which is erratic and unmappable. The Homo Americanus is an ideological entity whose thought and even morality are forbidden from universal abstraction. Janowski mounts the offensive against what the American holds most sacred, and he does so in order to save him. After exposing the danger and the damage done, Janowski makes another startling proposal. It is a “diseased collective mind” that is the source of this ideology, the liberal anti-perspective that presses man into the image of the Homo Americanus, and its grip can only be broken through the recovery of instinct. Homo Americanus cannot be free again until he is himself again. That is, until the shadow that belongs only to him is restored, and he is thereby no longer alienated from others. Despite the condemnation Janowski seems to be levying on the citizen of the United States, he betrays a great hope and confidence that the means to shake ourselves awake from the bad dream are nevertheless in hand. Janowski’s work is the next title in St. Augustine’s Press Dissident American Thought Today Series. It occupies a controversial overlapping terrain between the philosophical descriptions of liberalism as a tradition, psychology and the fundamentally influential critiques of democracy offered by Thucydides, Jefferson, Franklin, Tocqueville, Mill, Burke and more. More anecdotal than analytical, Janowski offers the contemporary proof that the reader is right to be scandalized by democracy and his or her own likeness of the Homo Americanus. Once upon a time it was the despicable Homo Sovieticus fruit of tyranny, but now we fear democratic society too might fall and all its citizens never be found again.
£20.00
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Clinical Psychology: A Global Perspective
The first book to offer a truly global perspective on the theory and practice of clinical psychology While clinical psychology is practiced the world over, up to now there has been no text devoted to examining it within a global context. The first book of its kind, Clinical Psychology: A Global Perspective brings together contributions from clinicians and scholars around the world to share their insights and observations on the theory and practice of clinical psychology. Due partly to language barriers and entrenched cultural biases, there is little cultural cross-pollination within the field of clinical psychology. In fact, most of the popular texts were written for English-speaking European and Anglo-American audiences and translated for other countries. As a result, most psychologists are unaware of how their profession is conceptualized and practiced in different regions, or how their own practices can be enriched by knowledge of the theories and modalities predominant among colleagues in other parts of the world. This book represents an important first step toward rectifying that state of affairs. Explores key differences and similarities in how clinical psychology is conceptualized and practiced with children, adolescents and adults across different countries and cultures Addresses essential research methods, clinical interviews, psychometric testing, neuropsychological assessments, and dominant treatment modalities Follows a consistent format with each chapter focusing on a specific area of the practice of clinical psychology while integrating cultural issues within the discussion Includes coverage of how to adapt one’s practice to the differing cultures of individual clients, and how to work in multidisciplinary teams within a global context Clinical Psychology: A Global Perspective is a valuable resource for students, trainees, and practicing psychologists, especially those who work with ethnic minority groups or with interpreters. It is also a must-read for practitioners who are considering working internationally.
£101.96
Rowman & Littlefield The New Urban Paradigm: Critical Perspectives on the City
As economic, political, and cultural centers, cities are at the heart of most contemporary societies, as they have been for millennia. In spite of the Cassandras who periodically lament their demise or imminent death, cities have a way of coming back from their low points—of surviving economic crises, outmigration, and vexing social dilemmas. Today, many large US cities once thought to be dying have rebounded not only because of economic restructuring or high-tech industries but also because of the vigor of new migrants coming into the urban system. Significantly, the ongoing boom-bust cycles in the cities are linked ultimately to major decisions made by those at the helm of the now globalized system of contemporary capitalism. In this book, Joe R. Feagin assesses urban questions from the 'new urban sociology' perspective that has developed since the 1980s. One of the leading figures in this tradition of thought, Feagin places class and racial domination at the heart of the analysis of city life, change, and development. His approach takes into account political-economic histories and the rise and fall of their social institutions; the character and impact of their underlying systems of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy; and how these dynamics play out in the everyday lives of contemporary urbanites. Framing urban questions this way not only puts the actions of elites at the forefront of analysis, but also raises questions about their ill-gotten privileges. It features the historical conditions and institutions that protect class and racial privileges—making it clear why people in cities rebel and why we as social scientists must take a lesson from these urban rebellions, focusing future research on large-scale urban transformation.
£62.00
The Catholic University of America Press Father Hartke: His Life and Legacy to the American Theater
Fortune magazine called Gilbert V. Hartke one of the five most powerful men in Washington, D.C. He was at once a flamboyant showman, respected statesman, and devout Dominican priest. The day after his death in February 1986, the Washington Post mourned him with a moving editorial and a full-page obituary that declared, ""Father Hartke was a figure of legendary stature in the Washington theater community, but his influence and reputation extended far beyond..."" In this long-awaited biography, Mary Jo Santo Pietro chronicles Father Hartke's experiences and endless achievements by combining his own stories, taped weekly during the last year of his life, with stories told by friends, colleagues, and celebrities. The book offers an inside look at major theatrical and political events in the nation's capital from the 1930s through the 1980s, and also uncovers the complex and paradoxical character of the man known as the ""White House priest"" and ""Show Biz priest."" Father Hartke founded and for thirty-seven years headed the famed Speech and Drama Department at the Catholic University of America. It was the first of its kind at an American Catholic college, and it shaped dozens of Oscar, Tony, and Pulitzer prize-winning actors, directors, and playwrights. Hartke founded America's oldest classical touring company, wrote five full-length plays, directed more than seventy plays, sent nine productions to Broadway, and received numerous honorary doctorates and awards. He was a presidential envoy to several countries, a member of the first National Council on the Arts, and a leader in the campaigns to end racial discrimination in Washington's theaters, to build the Kennedy Center, and to construct the CUA theater that now bears his name.
£44.95
Rowman & Littlefield Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools--And Why It Isn't So
How can we fix America's floundering public schools? The conventional wisdom says that schools need a lot more money, that poor and immigrant children can't do as well as most American kids, that high-stakes tests just produce teaching to the test, and that vouchers do little to help students while undermining our democracy. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? In Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools—And Why It Isn't So, Jay Greene and the researchers at the Manhattan Institute have gathered the evidence to show that much of what people believe about education policy is little more than a series of myths. Greene takes on the conventional wisdom and closely examines eighteen myths advanced by the special interest groups dominating public education. In addition to the money myth, the class size myth, and the teacher pay myth, Greene debunks the special education myth (special ed programs burden public schools), the certification myth (certified or more experience teachers are more effective in the classroom), the graduation myth (nearly all students graduate from high school), the draining myth (choice harms public schools), the segregation myth (private schools are more racially segregated), and several more. Greene's reasoned and accessible approach identifies the myth and then refutes it with relevant and reliable facts and figures-including the education establishment's own research. He believes our schools can be fixed and concludes the book with important recommendations that will achieve measurable and affordable success. This is essential reading for all those interested in quality public education and a wake-up call for undemanding taxpayers.
£20.46
WW Norton & Co I've Been Thinking
Daniel C. Dennett, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering the thorniest, most fundamental mysteries of the mind. Do we have free will? What is consciousness and how did it come about? What distinguishes human minds from the minds of animals? Dennett’s answers have profoundly shaped our age of philosophical thought. In I’ve Been Thinking, he reflects on his amazing career and lifelong scientific fascinations. Dennett’s relentless curiosity has taken him from a childhood in Beirut and the classrooms of Harvard, Oxford, and Tufts, to “Cognitive Cruises” on sailboats and the fields and orchards of Maine, and to laboratories and think tanks around the world. Along the way, I’ve Been Thinking provides a master class in the dominant themes of twentieth-century philosophy and cognitive science—including language, evolution, logic, religion, and AI—and reveals both the mistakes and breakthroughs that shaped Dennett’s theories. Key to this journey are Dennett’s interlocutors—Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, Willard Van Orman Quine, Gilbert Ryle, Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Gerald Edelman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jerry Fodor, Rodney Brooks, and more—whose ideas, even when he disagreed with them, helped to form his convictions about the mind and consciousness. Studded with photographs and told with characteristic warmth, I’ve Been Thinking also instills the value of life beyond the university, one enriched by sculpture, music, farming, and deep connection to family. Dennett compels us to consider: What do I really think? And what if I’m wrong? This memoir by one of the greatest minds of our time will speak to anyone who seeks to balance a life of the mind with adventure and creativity.
£27.13
New Harbinger Publications Bouncing Back from Rejection: Build the Resilience You Need to Get Back Up When Life Knocks You Down
Go beyond your fear of rejection to develop confidence, compassionate self-awareness, and resilience!Do you have a fear of rejection? If so, you aren't alone. But if you have difficulty bouncing back after rejection, experience intense pain as a result, or if the fear of rejection is so crippling that it interferes with your everyday life, it's time to make a change. This groundbreaking guide can help.With this book, you'll learn why you fear rejection by gaining an understanding of your unique attachment style. Secure attachment is defined as a feeling of being protected and well-cared for. People who experience secure attachment as young children are more likely to be happy, healthy, and resilient adults. On the other hand, insecurely attached people are less likely to cope well with rejection, and may have trouble "bouncing back" after difficult experiences. Once you understand how your attachment style has informed your fears, you can begin the work needed to overcome them!Using the theory of attachment, and the five domains of awareness: Sensations, Thoughts, Emotions, Actions, and Mentalizing (STEAM), you'll learn to relate to yourself and to others in more positive ways, even when difficult situations arise. So, whether you experience rejection in a romantic relationship, at work, or with friends, you'll have the resilience needed to recover quickly and focus on what makes you special and unique.This isn't a book that promises to protect you from future rejection. Unfortunately, rejection happens to everyone and is a normal part of life. But you will learn skills to handle this rejection and come to see it as less scary. With this view, you'll gain confidence, self-awareness, and the resilience needed to bounce back, even when life throws you a curveball.
£13.99
WW Norton & Co Tales from the Ant World
“Ants are the most warlike of all animals, with colony pitted against colony,” writes E.O. Wilson, one of the world’s most beloved scientists, “their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg.” In Tales from the Ant World, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Wilson takes us on a myrmecological tour to such far-flung destinations as Mozambique and New Guinea, the Gulf of Mexico’s Dauphin Island and even his parent’s overgrown backyard, thrillingly relating his nine-decade-long scientific obsession with over 15,000 ant species. Animating his scientific observations with illuminating personal stories, Wilson hones in on twenty-five ant species to explain how these genetically superior creatures talk, smell, and taste, and more significantly, how they fight to determine who is dominant. Wryly observing that “males are little more than flying sperm missiles” or that ants send their “little old ladies into battle,” Wilson eloquently relays his brushes with fire, army, and leafcutter ants, as well as more exotic species. Among them are the very rare Matabele, Africa’s fiercest warrior ants, whose female hunters can carry up to fifteen termites in their jaw (and, as Wilson reports from personal experience, have an incredibly painful stinger); Costa Rica’s Basiceros, the slowest of all ants; and New Caledonia’s Bull Ants, the most endangered of them all, which Wilson discovered in 2011 after over twenty years of presumed extinction. Richly illustrated throughout with depictions of ant species by Kristen Orr, as well as photos from Wilsons’ expeditions throughout the world, Tales from the Ant World is a fascinating, if not occasionally hair-raising, personal account by one of our greatest scientists and a necessary volume for any lover of the natural world.
£20.99
Stanford University Press Between Containment and Rollback: The United States and the Cold War in Germany
In the aftermath of World War II, American policymakers turned to the task of rebuilding Europe while keeping communism at bay. In Germany, formally divided since 1949,the United States prioritized the political, economic, and, eventually, military integration of the fledgling Federal Republic with the West. The extraordinary success story of forging this alliance has dominated our historical under-standing of the American-German relationship. Largely left out of the grand narrative of U.S.–German relations were most East Germans who found themselves caught under Soviet and then communist control by the post-1945 geo-political fallout of the war that Nazi Germany had launched. They were the ones who most dearly paid the price for the country's division. This book writes the East Germans—both leadership and general populace—back into that history as objects of American policy and as historical agents in their own right Based on recently declassified documents from American, Russian, and German archives, this book demonstrates that U.S. efforts from 1945 to 1953 went beyond building a prosperous democracy in western Germany and "containing" Soviet-Communist power to the east. Under the Truman and then the Eisenhower administrations, American policy also included efforts to undermine and "roll back" Soviet and German communist control in the eastern part of the country. This story sheds light on a dark-er side to the American Cold War in Germany: propaganda, covert operations, economic pressure, and psychological warfare. Christian F. Ostermann takes an international history approach, capturing Soviet and East German responses and actions, and drawing a rich and complex picture of the early East–West confrontation in the heart of Europe.
£40.50
Cornell University Press The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War
"The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere offers a lucid, dynamic, and highly readable history of Japan's attempt to usher in a new order in Asia during World War II."― Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review In The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jeremy A. Yellen exposes the history, politics, and intrigue that characterized the era when Japan's "total empire" met the total war of World War II. He illuminates the ways in which the imperial center and its individual colonies understood the concept of the Sphere, offering two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and always intertwined visions—one from Japan, the other from Burma and the Philippines. Yellen argues that, from 1940 to 1945, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere epitomized two concurrent wars for Asia's future: the first was for a new type of empire in Asia, and the second was a political war, waged by nationalist elites in the colonial capitals of Rangoon and Manila. Exploring Japanese visions for international order in the face of an ever-changing geopolitical situation, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere explores wartime Japan's desire to shape and control its imperial future while its colonies attempted to do the same. At Japan's zenith as an imperial power, the Sphere represented a plan for regional domination; by the end of the war, it had been recast as the epitome of cooperative internationalism. In the end, the Sphere could not survive wartime defeat, and Yellen's lucidly written account reveals much about the desires of Japan as an imperial and colonial power, as well as the ways in which the subdued colonies in Burma and the Philippines jockeyed for agency and a say in the future of the region.
£97.20
New York University Press Homegrown: Identity and Difference in the American War on Terror
An insightful study of how identity is mobilized in and for war in the face of homegrown terrorism. “You are either with us, or against us” is the refrain that captures the spirit of the global war on terror. Images of the “them” implied in this war cry—distinct foreign “others”—inundate Americans on hit television shows, Hollywood blockbusters, and nightly news. However, in this book, Piotr Szpunar tells the story of a fuzzier image: the homegrown terrorist, a foe that blends into the crowd, who Americans are told looks, talks, and acts “like us.” Homegrown delves into the dynamics of domestic counterterrorism, revealing the complications that arise when the terrorist threat involves Americans, both residents and citizens, who have taken up arms against their own country. Szpunar examines the ways in which identities are blurred in the war on terror, amid debates concerning who is “the real terrorist.” He considers cases ranging from the white supremacist Sikh Temple shooter,,to the Newburgh Four, ex-convicts caught up in an FBI informant-led plot to bomb synagogues, to ecoterrorists, to the Tsarnaev brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing. Drawing on popular media coverage, court documents, as well as “terrorist”-produced media, Szpunar poses new questions about the strategic deployment of identity in times of conflict. The book argues that homegrown terrorism challenges our long held understandings of how identity and difference play out in war—beyond “us versus them”—and, more importantly, that the way in which it is conceptualized and combatted has real consequences for social, cultural, and political notions of citizenship and belonging. The first critical examination of homegrown terrorism, this book will make you question how we make sense of the actions of ourselves and others in global war, and the figures that fall in between.
£66.60
Johns Hopkins University Press Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Opportunities for Colleges and Universities
How can striving Hispanic-Serving Institutions serve their students while countering the dominant preconceptions of colleges and universities?Winner of the AAHHE Book of the Year Award by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher EducationHispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs)—not-for-profit, degree-granting colleges and universities that enroll at least 25% or more Latinx students—are among the fastest-growing higher education segments in the United States. As of fall 2016, they represented 15% of all postsecondary institutions in the United States and enrolled 65% of all Latinx college students. As they increase in number, these questions bear consideration: What does it mean to serve Latinx students? What special needs does this student demographic have? And what opportunities and challenges develop when a college or university becomes an HSI? In Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Gina Ann Garcia explores how institutions are serving Latinx students, both through traditional and innovative approaches. Drawing on empirical data collected over two years at three HSIs, Garcia adopts a counternarrative approach to highlight the ways that HSIs are reframing what it means to serve Latinx college students. She questions the extent to which they have been successful in doing this while exploring how those institutions grapple with the tensions that emerge from confronting traditional standards and measures of success for postsecondary institutions. Laying out what it means for these three extremely different HSIs, Garcia also highlights the differences in the way each approaches its role in serving Latinxs. Incorporating the voices of faculty, staff, and students, Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions asserts that HSIs are undervalued, yet reveals that they serve an important role in the larger landscape of postsecondary institutions.
£26.50
Cornell University Press Russia in a Box: Art and Identity in an Age of Revolution
What did it mean to be Russian as the imperial era gave way to Soviet rule? Andrew Jenks turns to a unique art form produced in the village of Palekh to investigate how artists and craftsmen helped to reshape Russian national identity. Russia in a Box follows the development of Palekh art over two centuries as it adapted to dramatic changes in the Russian nation. As early as the sixteenth century, the peasant "masters" of Palekh painted religious icons. It was not until Russia's victory over Napoleon in 1814, however, that the village gained widespread recognition for its artistic contributions. That same year, the poet Goethe's discovery of the works of Palekh artists and craftsmen spurred interest in preserving the sacred art. The religious icons produced by Palekh masters in the nineteenth century became a source of Russian national pride. By the 1880s, some artists began to foresee their future as secular artists—a trend that was ensured by the Bolshevik Revolution. Tolerated and sometimes even encouraged by the new regime, the Palekh artists began to create finely decorated lacquered boxes that portray themes from fairy tales and idealized Russian history in exquisite miniatures. A new medium with new subject matter, these lacquered boxes became a new symbol of Russian identity during the 1920s. Palekh art endured varying levels of acceptance, denial, state control, and reliance on market-driven forces. What began as the art form of religious iconic painting, enduring for more than two centuries, was abruptly changed by the revolutionaries. Throughout the twentieth century the fate of Palekh art remained in question as Russia's political and cultural entities struggled for dominance. Ultimately capitalism and the Palekhian masters were victorious, and the famed lacquer boxes continue to be a source of Russian identity and pride.
£36.00
Duke University Press The Last "Darky": Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora
The Last “Darky” establishes Bert Williams, the comedian of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as central to the development of a global black modernism centered in Harlem’s Renaissance. Before integrating Broadway in 1910 via a controversial stint with the Ziegfeld Follies, Williams was already an international icon. Yet his name has faded into near obscurity, his extraordinary accomplishments forgotten largely because he performed in blackface. Louis Chude-Sokei contends that Williams’s blackface was not a display of internalized racism nor a submission to the expectations of the moment. It was an appropriation and exploration of the contradictory and potentially liberating power of racial stereotypes.Chude-Sokei makes the crucial argument that Williams’s minstrelsy negotiated the place of black immigrants in the cultural hotbed of New York City and was replicated throughout the African diaspora, from the Caribbean to Africa itself. Williams was born in the Bahamas. When performing the “darky,” he was actually masquerading as an African American. This black-on-black minstrelsy thus challenged emergent racial constructions equating “black” with African American and marginalizing the many diasporic blacks in New York. It also dramatized the practice of passing for African American common among non-American blacks in an African American–dominated Harlem. Exploring the thought of figures such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Claude McKay, Chude-Sokei situates black-on-black minstrelsy at the center of burgeoning modernist discourses of assimilation, separatism, race militancy, carnival, and internationalism. While these discourses were engaged with the question of representing the “Negro” in the context of white racism, through black-on-black minstrelsy they were also deployed against the growing international influence of African American culture and politics in the twentieth century.
£27.99
New York University Press Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy
How Spanish-language radio has influenced American and Latino discourse on key current affairs issues such as citizenship and immigration. Winner, Book of the Year presented by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Honorable Mention for the 2015 Latino Studies Best Book presented by the Latin American Studies Association The last two decades have produced continued Latino population growth, and marked shifts in both communications and immigration policy. Since the 1990s, Spanish- language radio has dethroned English-language radio stations in major cities across the United States, taking over the number one spot in Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and New York City. Investigating the cultural and political history of U.S. Spanish-language broadcasts throughout the twentieth century, Sounds of Belonging reveals how these changes have helped Spanish-language radio secure its dominance in the major U.S. radio markets. Bringing together theories on the immigration experience with sound and radio studies, Dolores Inés Casillas documents how Latinos form listening relationships with Spanish-language radio programming. Using a vast array of sources, from print culture and industry journals to sound archives of radio programming, she reflects on institutional growth, the evolution of programming genres, and reception by the radio industry and listeners to map the trajectory of Spanish-language radio, from its grassroots origins to the current corporate-sponsored business it has become. Casillas focuses on Latinos’ use of Spanish-language radio to help navigate their immigrant experiences with U.S. institutions, for example in broadcasting discussions about immigration policies while providing anonymity for a legally vulnerable listenership. Sounds of Belonging proposes that debates of citizenship are not always formal personal appeals but a collective experience heard loudly through broadcast radio.
£58.50
University of Pennsylvania Press The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times
The era of the Roman Empire was distinguished by an explosion of images and texts in a variety of media—metal, papyrus, mosaic, gemstone—all designed to protect, heal, or grant some abstract benefit to the persons who wore them on their bodies or placed them in their homes. In the past scholars have explained this proliferation of readily identifiable amulets by a sudden need for magic or by a precipitous rise in superstition or anxiety in this period, connected, perhaps, with the internal breakdown of Greek rationalism or the migration of superstitious peoples from the East. Christopher A. Faraone argues, instead, that these amulets were not invented in this period as a result of an alteration in the Roman worldview or a tidal wave of "oriental" influence, but rather that they only become visible to us in the archaeological record as a result of a number of technical innovations and transformations: the increased epigraphic habit of the Imperial period, the miniaturization of traditional domestic amulets, like the triple-faced Hecate, on durable gems, or the utilization of newly crafted Egyptianizing iconography. In short, it is only when explicitly protective or curative texts, or strange new images, are added to traditional Greek amulets, that modern observers realize that these objects were thought to have the power to protect or heal all along. The real question addressed by the book, then, is not why we can identify so many amulets in the Roman Imperial period but, rather, why we have failed to identify them in artifacts of the preceding centuries. Featuring more than 120 illustrations, The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times is not only a tremendous resource for those working in the fields of ancient magic and religion but also an essential reference for those interested in the religion, culture, and history of the ancient Mediterranean.
£81.90
University of Pennsylvania Press Rural Athens Under the Democracy
Much of the evidence—literary, historical, documentary, and pictorial—from ancient Athens is urban in authorship, subject matter, and intended audience. The result has been the assertion of an undifferentiated monolithic "Athenian" citizen regime as often as not identifiably urban in its lifestyle, preoccupations, and attitude. In Rural Athens Under the Democracy, however, Nicholas F. Jones undertakes the first comprehensive attempt to reconstruct on its own terms the world of rural Attica outside the walls during the "classical" fifth and fourth centuries B.C. What he finds is a distinctly nonurban (and nonurbane) order dominated by a traditional, predominantly agrarian society and culture. Jones relies heavily upon the relatively neglected epigraphic record from the rural countryside and villages, as well as posing new questions of the well-known urban writings of Athenian historians, essayists, and philosophers and occasionally following the lead of Hesiod's agrarian poem Works and Days. From these sources he gleans new findings regarding settlement patterns, argues for a heretofore unrecognized system of personal patronage, explores relations between villages and the town of Athens, reconstructs the "Agrarian" Dionysia in several of its more important dimensions, and contrasts the realities of rural Attic culture with their various representations in contemporary literary and philosophical writings by Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and others. Building on Jones's previous publications on the ancient Greek city-state, Rural Athens Under the Democracy presents the first holistic examination of classical extramural Attica. He challenges the received view that ancient Athens in its heyday was marked by a uniform cultural, ideological, and conspicuously citified order and, in place of the perception of things rural as mere deficits in urbanity, proposes that we look at Attica outside the walls in its own right and in positive terms.
£55.80
University of Pennsylvania Press Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic
In this provocative and historically detailed reading of the relations between Victorian liberalism and aestheticism, David Wayne Thomas challenges current critical assumptions concerning modern liberal agency and aesthetic experience more generally. Through meticulous examinations of literature, visual arts, popular culture, and politics, Cultivating Victorians shows how a mid-Victorian liberal discourse of individual "many-sidedness"—understood as a cultivated disposition toward self-criticism and open-mindedness—was taken up by artists and writers as they claimed for art a self-reflecting agency at the core of the liberal ideal. Thomas makes plain, as well, the ongoing but often repressed stake of latter-day critics in the aesthetics of many-sidedness. As Thomas shows, an increasingly dominant mid-Victorian liberal culture employed its rhetoric of cultivation in projects as varied as aesthetic appreciation, self-improvement, and social amelioration. By looking to topics across both elite and popular culture, Thomas demonstrates how this liberal culture had to take shape in competition with other dimensions of Victorian public life. Thus several uncommon but illuminating contexts come under inspection here: the bizarre sensation of the Tichborne Claimant, a low-born imposter claiming a noble inheritance; the reportage on life-scale historical city replicas fashioned for temporary public exhibitions in the 1880s; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's practice of producing and reproducing his artwork for a newly constituted consumer market. Thomas also reads extensively in notable Victorian intellectuals such as George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde. Theoretically inventive, engagingly written, and vividly illustrated, Cultivating Victorians is a timely invitation to rethink liberal values—like autonomy and reflective judgment—that have been routinely condemned as atomistic individualism and false universalism in recent decades.
£52.20
University of Nebraska Press Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting
Chosen for 2015 One Book One Nebraska In 1961, equipped with a master’s degree from famed Columbia Journalism School and letters of introduction to Associated Press bureau chiefs in Asia, twenty-six-year-old Beverly Deepe set off on a trip around the world. Allotting just two weeks to South Vietnam, she was still there seven years later, having then earned the distinction of being the longest-serving American correspondent covering the Vietnam War and garnering a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In Death Zones and Darling Spies, Beverly Deepe Keever describes what it was like for a farm girl from Nebraska to find herself halfway around the world, trying to make sense of one of the nation’s bloodiest and bitterest wars. She arrived in Saigon as Vietnam’s war entered a new phase and American helicopter units and provincial advisers were unpacking. She tells of traveling from her Saigon apartment to jungles where Wild West–styled forts first dotted Vietnam’s borders and where, seven years later, they fell like dominoes from communist-led attacks. In 1965 she braved elephant grass with American combat units armed with unparalleled technology to observe their valor—and their inability to distinguish friendly farmers from hide-and-seek guerrillas. Keever’s trove of tissue-thin memos to editors, along with published and unpublished dispatches for New York and London media, provide the reader with you-are-there descriptions of Buddhist demonstrations and turning-point coups as well as phony ones. Two Vietnamese interpreters, self-described as “darling spies,” helped her decode Vietnam’s shadow world and subterranean war. These memoirs, at once personal and panoramic, chronicle the horrors of war and a rise and decline of American power and prestige.
£23.99
Cornell University Press The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina
During the first quarter-century of the Cold War, upholding human rights was rarely a priority in U.S. policy toward Latin America. Seeking to protect U.S. national security, American policymakers quietly cultivated relations with politically ambitious Latin American militaries—a strategy clearly evident in the Ford administration's tacit support of state-sanctioned terror in Argentina following the 1976 military coup d’état. By the mid-1970s, however, the blossoming human rights movement in the United States posed a serious threat to the maintenance of close U.S. ties to anticommunist, right-wing military regimes.The competition between cold warriors and human rights advocates culminated in a fierce struggle to define U.S. policy during the Jimmy Carter presidency. In The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, William Michael Schmidli argues that Argentina emerged as the defining test case of Carter’s promise to bring human rights to the center of his administration’s foreign policy. Entering the Oval Office at the height of the kidnapping, torture, and murder of tens of thousands of Argentines by the military government, Carter set out to dramatically shift U.S. policy from subtle support to public condemnation of human rights violation. But could the administration elicit human rights improvements in the face of a zealous military dictatorship, rising Cold War tension, and domestic political opposition? By grappling with the disparate actors engaged in the struggle over human rights, including civil rights activists, second-wave feminists, chicano/a activists, religious progressives, members of the New Right, conservative cold warriors, and business leaders, Schmidli utilizes unique interviews with U.S. and Argentine actors as well as newly declassified archives to offer a telling analysis of the rise, efficacy, and limits of human rights in shaping U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War.
£97.20
Princeton University Press The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences
How the classic mirror test served as a portal for scientists to explore questions of self-awarenessSince the late eighteenth century, scientists have placed subjects—humans, infants, animals, and robots—in front of mirrors in order to look for signs of self-recognition. Mirrors served as the possible means for answering the question: What makes us human? In The Mirror and the Mind, Katja Guenther traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test, exploring how researchers from a range of disciplines—psychoanalysis, psychiatry, developmental and animal psychology, cybernetics, anthropology, and neuroscience—came to read the peculiar behaviors elicited by mirrors. Investigating the ways mirrors could lead to both identification and misidentification, Guenther looks at how such experiments ultimately failed to determine human specificity.The mirror test was thrust into the limelight when Charles Darwin challenged the idea that language sets humans apart. Thereafter the mirror, previously a recurrent if marginal scientific tool, became dominant in attempts to demarcate humans from other animals. But because researchers could not rely on language to determine what their nonspeaking subjects were experiencing, they had to come up with significant innovations, including notation strategies, testing protocols, and the linking of scientific theories across disciplines. From the robotic tortoises of Grey Walter and the mark test of Beulah Amsterdam and Gordon Gallup, to anorexia research and mirror neurons, the mirror test offers a window into the emergence of such fields as biology, psychology, psychiatry, animal studies, cognitive science, and neuroscience.The Mirror and the Mind offers an intriguing history of experiments in self-awareness and the advancements of the human sciences across more than a century.
£31.50
Harvard University Press Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions along the Mississippi
A riveting account of the conquest of the vast American heartland that offers a vital reconsideration of the relationship between Native Americans and European colonists, and the pivotal role of the mighty Mississippi.America’s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication. Cutting a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River meant wealth, knowledge, and power for those who could master it. In this ambitious and elegantly written account of the conquest of the West, Jacob Lee offers a new understanding of early America based on the long history of warfare and resistance in the Mississippi River valley.Lee traces the Native kinship ties that determined which nations rose and fell in the period before the Illinois became dominant. With a complex network of allies stretching from Lake Superior to Arkansas, the Illinois were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers—fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette—made their way down the Mississippi. Over the next century, a succession of European empires claimed parts of the midcontinent, but they all faced the challenge of navigating Native alliances and social structures that had existed for centuries. When American settlers claimed the region in the early nineteenth century, they overturned 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans.Masters of the Middle Waters shows that the Mississippi and its tributaries were never simply a backdrop to unfolding events. We cannot understand the trajectory of early America without taking into account the vast heartland and its waterways, which advanced and thwarted the aspirations of Native nations, European imperialists, and American settlers alike.
£33.26
University of Washington Press Qing Governors and Their Provinces: The Evolution of Territorial Administration in China, 1644-1796
During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the province emerged as an important element in the management of the expanding Chinese empire, with governors -- those in charge of these increasingly influential administrative units -- playing key roles. R. Kent Guy’s comprehensive study of this shift concentrates on the governorship system during the reigns of the Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors, who ruled China from 1644 to 1796. In the preceding Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the responsibilities of provincial officials were ill-defined and often shifting; Qing governors, in contrast, were influential members of a formal administrative hierarchy and enjoyed the support of the central government, including access to resources. These increasingly powerful officials extended the court’s influence into even the most distant territories of the Qing empire. Both masters of the routine processes of administration and troubleshooters for the central government, Qing governors were economic and political administrators who played crucial roles in the management of a larger and more complex empire than the Chinese had ever known. Administrative concerns varied from region to region: Henan was dominated by the great Yellow River, which flowed through the province; the Shandong governor dealt with the exchange of goods, ideas, and officials along the Grand Canal; in Zhili, relations between civilians and bannermen in the strategically significant coastal plain were key; and in northwestern Shanxi, governors dealt with border issues. Qing Governors and Their Provinces uses the records of governors’ appointments and the laws and practices that shaped them to reconstruct the development of the office of provincial governor and to examine the histories of governors’ appointments in each province. Interwoven throughout is colorful detail drawn from the governors’ biographies.
£81.90
Columbia University Press Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture
Both the Prophet Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon have been characterized as ardently, indeed evangelically, anti-Masonic. Yet in this sweeping social, cultural, and religious history of nineteenth-century Mormonism and its milieu, Clyde Forsberg argues that masonry, like evangelical Christianity, was an essential component of Smith's vision. Smith's ability to imaginatively conjoin the two into a powerful and evocative defense of Christian, or Primitive, Freemasonry was, Forsberg shows, more than anything else responsible for the meteoric rise of Mormonism in the nineteenth century. This was to have significant repercussions for the development of Mormonism, particularly in the articulation of specifically Mormon gender roles. Mormonism's unique contribution to the Masonic tradition was its inclusion of women as active and equal participants in Masonic rituals. Early Mormon dreams of empire in the Book of Mormon were motivated by a strong desire to end social and racial discord, lest the country fall into the grips of civil war. Forsberg demonstrates that by seeking to bring women into previously male-exclusive ceremonies, Mormonism offered an alternative to the male-dominated sphere of the Master Mason. By taking a median and mediating position between Masonry and Evangelicism, Mormonism positioned itself as a religion of the people, going on to become a world religion. But the original intent of the Book of Mormon gave way as Mormonism moved west, and the temple and polygamy (indeed, the quest for empire) became more prevalent. The murder of Smith by Masonic vigilantes and the move to Utah coincided with a new imperialism-and a new polygamy. Forsberg argues that Masonic artifacts from Smith's life reveal important clues to the precise nature of his early Masonic thought that include no less than a vision of redemption and racial concord.
£49.50