Search results for ""author stills"
University of Minnesota Press Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants
With a low rate of immigration and a high rate of interracial marriage, Japanese Americans today compose the Asian ethnic group with the largest proportion of mixed-race members. Within Japanese American communities, increased participation by mixed-race members, along with concerns about overassimilation, has led to a search for cultural authenticity, giving new answers to the question, Who is Japanese American? In Pure Beauty, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain tackles this question by studying a cultural institution: Japanese American community beauty pageants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Honolulu. King-O’Riain employs rich ethnographic fieldwork to discover how these pageants seek to maintain racial and ethnic purity amid shifting notions of cultural identity. She uses revealing in-depth interviews with candidates, queens, and community members, her experiences as a pageant committee member, and archival research—including Japanese and English newspapers, museum collections, private photo albums, and mementos—to establish both the importance and impossibility of racial purity. King-O’Riain examines racial eligibility rules and tests, which encompass not only ancestry but also residency, community service, and culture, and traces the history of pageants throughout the United States. Pure Beauty shows how racial and gendered meanings are enacted through the pageants, and reveals their impact on Japanese American men, women, and children. King-O’Riain concludes that the mixed-race challenge to racial understandings of Japanese Americanness does not necessarily mean an end to race as we know it and asserts that race is work—created and re-created in a social context. Ultimately, she determines that the concept of race, fragile though it may be, is still one of the categories by which Japanese Americans are judged.Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain is lecturer in sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
£19.99
University of South Carolina Press Building Culture: Studies in the Intellectual History of Industrializing America, 1867-1910
An unprecedented wave of interest in building new cultural institutions swept through America from the end of the Civil War through the first decade of the twentieth century. Traditionally historians have told us that this sea change was the work of various elites intent on controlling the turmoil and divisions that accompanied the industrialization of the American economy. In Building Culture, Richard Teichgraeber rejects this hierarchical account to pursue one that highlights the multiplicity of attitudes and interests that were on display in America's first great effort to build national cultural institutions. Teichgraeber also lays the groundwork of a new interpretive framework for understanding this multisided effort. Most native-born American champions of ""culture,"" he contends, viewed it as an authentically individualistic ideal. For them the concept continued to carry its antebellum meaning of self-culture—that is, individual self-development or self-improvement—and thus was quite resistant to closure around any single fixed definition of what being cultivated might mean. They also recognized that in America culture had to connect with the choices of ordinary men and women and therefore had to be fashioned to serve the uses of a democratic rather than an aristocratic society. To show how and why this inclusive view of culture was accompanied by a prodigious expansion of American cultural institutions, Teichgraeber also explores two of the central but still inadequately mapped developments in the intellectual and cultural history of the industrial era: the multifaceted—and ultimately successful—effort to secure Ralph Waldo Emerson a central place in American culture at large; and the growth and consolidation of the American university system, certainly the most important of the new cultural institutions built during the industrial era. Elegantly written and featuring twenty-two illustrations, Building Culture expands our knowledge of the formation of modern American culture and opens new paths of inquiry into contemporary cultural and intellectual concerns.
£49.27
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past
Exploring notions of history, collective memory, cultural memory, public memory, official memory, and public history, Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past explains how ordinary citizens, social groups, governments and institutions engage with the past of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. It illuminates how and why over the last five decades the debates about slavery have become so relevant in the societies where slavery existed and which participated in the Atlantic slave trade. The book draws on a variety of case studies to investigate its central questions. How have social actors and groups in Europe, Africa and the Americas engaged with the slave past of their societies? Are there are any relations between the demands to rename streets of Liverpool in England and the protests to take down Confederate monuments in the United States? How have black and white social actors and scholars influenced the ways slavery is represented in George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in the United States?How do slave cemeteries in Brazil and the United States and the walls of names of Whitney Plantation speak to other initiatives honoring enslaved people in England and South Africa? What shared problems and goals have led to the creation of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC? Why have artists used their works to confront the debates about slavery and its legacies? The important debates addressed in this book resonate in the present day. Arguing that memory of slavery is racialized and gendered, the book shows that more than just attempts to come to terms with the past, debates about slavery are associated with the persistent racial inequalities, racism, and white supremacy which still shape societies where slavery existed. Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past is thus a vital resource for students and scholars of the Atlantic world, the history of slavery and public history.
£22.99
University of Washington Press Native Arts of the Columbia Plateau: The Doris Swayze Bounds Collection of Native American Artifacts
Colorfully beaded handbags, superbly tanned and decorated deerskin shirts, finely woven baskets, exquisitely beaded and fringed horse trappings -- these distinctive Native arts of the Columbia River Plateau have been overshadowed in the public eye by the arts of the Northwest Coast, Great Plains, and American Southwest. But Indians in the region where present-day Washington, Oregon, and Idaho share boundaries have for centuries combined function and beauty in the items they made for even the most mundane of uses, and their traditional arts are still vital today. This book brings overdue recognition to the artistry and craftsmanship of the Plateau Indians by focusing on the remarkable collection amassed by the late Doris Swayze Bounds, a banker in Hermiston, Oregon, who grew up with and deeply loved Native people and their culture. She was loved in return, and many of the nearly 1,000 Plateau items in her collection came to her as gifts from her Indian friends, who expressed their respect and affection through the time-honored tradition of gift-giving. Exposed to Euro-Americans relatively late, the Plateau Indians managed to retain many of their traditional lifeways of fishing, hunting, and gathering, as well as a vigorous ethic of generosity and respect for others. The pieces in the Bounds collection, which date mainly from the 1870s to the 1960s, reflect all these aspects of Plateau culture. They range from sturdy baskets made to hold roots or berries to elaborately beaded elkhide “tail dresses” worn on festive occasions. In five essays, both Native and non-Native experts describe the art styles and the uses and cultural meanings of the items; two other recount Doris Bound’s life, collecting practices, and relationships with Native Americans. The essays are handsomely illustrated with items from the Bounds collection. This book offers and introduction to this visually stunning art tradition.
£1,218.54
Peepal Tree Press Ltd First Rain
'First Rain' is a spirit journey to pull together a 'necessary, fractured past', a poetic record of a struggle towards wholeness. In the first part, 'Bush Roots', Weir-Soley recovers her ancestral past in a series of narratives and dramatic monologues that give a living, breathing portrayal of a Jamaica that is gone, but whose parable-speaking elders still offer a guide to survival. Whether from actual memory, the fragments of family story, the clues from photographs or from a dreaming imagination, Weir-Soley presents a grandfather's 'dutty-tuff' vision, a grandmother's 'bush magic', the practical, gruff goodness of Uncle Miguel, the car mechanic who teaches generations of boys useful skills, who she sees as Ogun, a 'lesser god/for a greater good', and many others. These are people she makes you regret not having known, but grateful that she shares them. It is a world built up in careful detail, a complex, nuanced world that contains both neighbourly solidarity, but also the dividing gradations of class, skin-colour and occupation; a world where women can be treated as beasts of burden, where 'outside' children suffer emotional abuse, but where men like her uncle are shown behaving with great tenderness towards children. Against the solidity of this world, part two, 'Exiled Musings', contrasts the nightmarish, temporariness of Caribbean migrant life in the USA, a people 'orphaned from our homes'. Here, Weir-Soley brings the realities of the travails of young black men with the law, black on black violence, crack and HIV/Aids into sharp and often angry focus. But in the final parts, 'Heartwars' and 'Incantations', we see the struggles to rebuild family and respect, and the capacity for joy and sensuality, the resilience and spirituality of a people who never lose their sense of God's grace.
£8.23
Oxbow Books From House Societies to States: Early Political Organisation, From Antiquity to the Middle Ages
The organisation and characteristics of early and ancient states have become the focus of a renewed interest from archaeologists, ancient historians and anthropologists in recent years. On the one hand, neo-evolutionary schemas of political transformation find it difficult to define some of their most basic concepts, such as ‘chiefdom’, ‘complex chiefdom’ and ‘state’, not to mention the transition between them. On the other hand, teleological interpretations based on linear dynamics, from less to increasingly more complex political structures, in successive steps, impose biased and too rigid views on the available evidence. In fact, recent research stresses the existence of other forms of socio-political organisation, less vertically integrated and more heterarchical, that proved highly successful and resilient in the long term in tying together social groups. What is more, such forms quite often represented the basic blocks on which states were built and that managed to survive once states collapsed. Finally, nomadic, maritime and mountain populations provide fascinating examples of societies that experienced alternative forms of political organisation, sometimes on a seasonal basis. In other cases, their consideration as ‘marginal’ populations that cultivated specialised skills ensured them a certain degree of autonomy when living either within or at the borders of states.This book explores such small-scale socio-political organisations, their potential and the historical trajectories they stimulated. A selection of historical case studies from different regions of the world may help rethink current concepts and views about the emergence and organisation of political complexity and the mechanisms that prevented, occasionally, the emergence of solid polities. They may also cast some light over trajectories of historical transformation, still poorly understood as are the limits of effective state power. This book explores the importance of comparative research and long-term historical perspectives to avoid simplistic interpretations, based on the characteristics of modern Western states abusively used retrospectively.
£55.00
Advantage Media Group Win Today: Embrace Discomfort, Look for Challenges and Win Every Day with Small Daily Activities
A Treasured Gift from a Father to his SonAs a senior in high school, I received a special gift from my father.As I was about to leave home for college, my father handed me an eleven-page handwritten letter that contained his best advice for his son. The letter contained quotes from Shakespeare, snippets from classic literature, and candid confessions about things that my dad wished he had done differently.The letter was written by pen but might as well have been written in granite. I still have this letter in a drawer in my bedroom closet and I read parts of it about once a month. To this day, I treasure my father’s words of wisdom.As we get older, we realize that there are many lessons that life gives us. These lessons in life are invaluable. But these lessons in life are not serving anyone unless we share them with our family, friends, and even strangers.About three years ago, I began writing the most important lessons that I’ve learned in my life. The life lessons range from almost every aspect of life, including health and nutrition, financial management, faith, professional goal setting, and virtues such as perseverance, sacrifice, and gratitude.Ninety-seven percent of these life lessons are based upon abject failures, repeated mistakes, and, in some cases, heartbreak, but our mistakes and failures make us who we are. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.Win Today was inspired by my father, James H. Fisher, Esq., who knew better than anyone that the greatest lessons aren’t taught in a classroom.
£22.99
WW Norton & Co The Origins of Creativity
In this profound and lyrical book, one of our most celebrated biologists offers a sweeping examination of the relationship between the humanities and the sciences: what they offer to each other, how they can be united, and where they still fall short. Both endeavours, Edward O. Wilson reveals, have their roots in human creativity—the defining trait of our species. Reflecting on the deepest origins of language, storytelling, and art, Wilson demonstrates how creativity began not ten thousand years ago, as we have long assumed, but over one hundred thousand years ago in the Paleolithic age. Chronicling this evolution of creativity from primate ancestors to humans, The Origins of Creativity shows how the humanities, spurred on by the invention of language, have played a largely unexamined role in defining our species. And in doing so, Wilson explores what we can learn about human nature from a surprising range of creative endeavors—the instinct to create gardens, the use of metaphors and irony in speech, and the power of music and song. Our achievements in science and the humanities, Wilson notes, make us uniquely advanced as a species, but also give us the potential to be supremely dangerous, most worryingly in our abuse of the planet. The humanities in particular suffer from a kind of anthropomorphism, encumbered by a belief that we are the only species among millions that seem to matter, yet Wilson optimistically reveals how researchers will have to address this parlous situation by pushing further into the realm of science, especially fields such as evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and anthropology. With eloquence and humanity, Wilson calls for a transformational "Third Enlightenment," in which the blending of these endeavors will give us a deeper understanding of the human condition and our crucial relationship with the natural world.
£19.99
Skyhorse Publishing Mystery on the Isles of Shoals: Closing the Case on the Smuttynose Ax Murders of 1873
For the first time, the full story of a crime that has haunted New England since 1873.The cold-blooded ax murder of two innocent Norwegian women at their island home off the coast of New Hampshire has gripped the region since 1873, beguiling tourists, inspiring artists, and fueling conspiracy theorists.The killer, a handsome Prussian fisherman down on his luck, was quickly captured, convicted in a widely publicized trial, and hanged in an unforgettable gallows spectacle. But he never confessed and, while in prison, gained a circle of admirers whose blind faith in his innocence still casts a shadow of doubt. A fictionalized bestselling novel and a Hollywood film have further clouded the truth.Finally a definitive "whydunnit" account of the Smuttynose Island ax murders has arrived. Popular historian J. Dennis Robinson fleshes out the facts surrounding this tragic robbery gone wrong in a captivating true crime page-turner. Robinson delves into the backstory at the rocky Isles of Shoals as an isolated centuries-old fishing village was being destroyed by a modern luxury hotel. He explores the neighboring island of Appledore where Victorian poet Celia Thaxter entertained the elite artists and writers of Boston. It was Thaxter's powerful essay about the murders in the Atlantic Monthly that shocked the American public.Robinson goes beyond the headlines of the burgeoning yellow press to explore the deeper lessons about American crime, justice, economics, and hero worship. Ten years before the Lizzie Borden ax murder trial and the fictional Sherlock Holmes, Americans met a sociopath named Louis Wagnerand many came to love him.
£20.00
Sounds True Inc Shakti Coloring Book: Goddesses, Mandalas, and the Power of Sacred Geometry
The term Shakti refers to the creative power of divinity—what artist and teacher Ekabhumi Charles Ellik calls "the electric juice of life." Shakti is personified by an array of revered goddesses who represent universal virtues and archetypal energies we all share. The Shakti Coloring Book was created to help you begin to activate the transformational currents of this sacred power in your own life—even if you’ve never considered yourself an artist. With The Shakti Coloring Book, Ekabhumi invites you to a serious yet thoroughly enjoyable practice. This comprehensive guidebook begins with "Recognizing Shakti," a survey of the goddesses and their traditional attributes along with the origin and purpose of mandalas, yantras, and sacred geometry. Part two, "Embodying Shakti," discusses the creation of mystic artworks and the making of art as a spiritual practice. Part three, "Coloring Shakti," presents 21 stunning images of goddesses paired with 21 mystic diagrams to color and meditate upon as portals to new insight, transformation, and, ultimately, self-realization. The book concludes with "Manifesting Shakti," a step-by-step training in creating a simple yantra (or "realization device") to be used for purification and as a foundation for higher-level yogic practices. "Making sacred art is a type of meditation," explains Ekabhumi, "helping us to come into stillness, focus our attention, and align with the principles portrayed in our artworks." Is there a virtue or trait that you would like to cultivate or strengthen? Are you looking for a way to deepen or expand your spiritual practice? Do you feel compelled by the beauty, mystery, and power of the goddesses? If so, The Shakti Coloring Book gives you a resource you will turn to time and again for inspiration, support, and self-expression.
£19.33
Skyhorse Publishing The 3 Ms of Fearless Digital Parenting: Proven Tools to Help You Raise Smart and Savvy Online Kids
How can we protect our kids online—and teach them to protect themselves? Do you feel overwhelmed with technology in your home? Do headlines about this app or that website make you feel anxious and undecided as a parent? Do you get advice from many experts—but still feel unclear on what to do? The book unpacks the “3 Ms” of parenting in the digital age, a proven approach used with thousands of parents through the work of Digital Respons-Ability and its founder, Carrie Rogers-Whitehead. When Carrie first started working in the field of digital citizenship, she found significant gaps in how digital parenting was taught. Not only were parents not informed enough around technology, they also didn’t understand child developmental stages. Parents’ expectations for their children were unrealistic because they didn’t know how online responsibility changes at different ages, as children’s brains change. From this realization, Carrie developed the 3 Ms—three approaches to digital parenting, based on specific age ranges: Model (ages 0-8) Manage (ages 8-13) Monitor (ages 13-18) By teaching parents how to change their approach to digital responsibility based on the developmental stage of their child, she has seen significant success in fostering happier and healthier relationships between parents and kids, as well as safer tech use by kids at all ages. This book presents Carrie’s approach in an accessible, easy-to-implement manner, giving all parents the opportunity to develop better tech use in their own homes and families, and to parent confidently and without fear.
£14.75
Johns Hopkins University Press The Dynamics of Democratization: Dictatorship, Development, and Diffusion
The explosive spread of democracy has radically transformed the international political landscape and captured the attention of academics, policy makers, and activists alike. With interest in democratization still growing, Nathan J. Brown and other leading political scientists assess the current state of the field, reflecting on the causes and diffusion of democracy over the past two decades. The volume focuses on three issues very much at the heart of discussions about democracy today: dictatorship, development, and diffusion. The essays first explore the surprising but necessary relationship between democracy and authoritarianism; they next analyze the introduction of democracy in developing countries; last, they examine how international factors affect the democratization process. In exploring these key issues, the contributors ask themselves three questions: What causes a democracy to emerge and succeed? Does democracy make things better? Can democracy be successfully promoted? In contemplating these questions, The Dynamics of Democratization offers a frank and critical assessment of the field for students and scholars of comparative politics and the political economy of development. Contributors: Gregg A. Brazinsky, George Washington University; Nathan J. Brown, George Washington University; Kathleen Bruhn, University of California at Santa Barbara; Valerie J. Bunce, Cornell University; Jose Antonio Cheibub, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Bruce J. Dickson, George Washington University; M. Steven Fish, University of California at Berkeley; John Gerring, Boston University; Henry E. Hale, George Washington University; Susan D. Hyde, Yale University; Craig M. Kauffman, George Washington University; Staffan I. Lindberg, University of Florida; Sara Meerow, University of Amsterdam; James Raymond Vreeland, Georgetown University; Sharon L. Wolchik, George Washington University
£33.19
Johns Hopkins University Press The Dynamics of Democratization: Dictatorship, Development, and Diffusion
The explosive spread of democracy has radically transformed the international political landscape and captured the attention of academics, policy makers, and activists alike. With interest in democratization still growing, Nathan J. Brown and other leading political scientists assess the current state of the field, reflecting on the causes and diffusion of democracy over the past two decades. The volume focuses on three issues very much at the heart of discussions about democracy today: dictatorship, development, and diffusion. The essays first explore the surprising but necessary relationship between democracy and authoritarianism; they next analyze the introduction of democracy in developing countries; last, they examine how international factors affect the democratization process. In exploring these key issues, the contributors ask themselves three questions: What causes a democracy to emerge and succeed? Does democracy make things better? Can democracy be successfully promoted? In contemplating these questions, The Dynamics of Democratization offers a frank and critical assessment of the field for students and scholars of comparative politics and the political economy of development. Contributors: Gregg A. Brazinsky, George Washington University; Nathan J. Brown, George Washington University; Kathleen Bruhn, University of California at Santa Barbara; Valerie J. Bunce, Cornell University; Jose Antonio Cheibub, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Bruce J. Dickson, George Washington University; M. Steven Fish, University of California at Berkeley; John Gerring, Boston University; Henry E. Hale, George Washington University; Susan D. Hyde, Yale University; Craig M. Kauffman, George Washington University; Staffan I. Lindberg, University of Florida; Sara Meerow, University of Amsterdam; James Raymond Vreeland, Georgetown University; Sharon L. Wolchik, George Washington University
£61.81
The Catholic University of America Press The Roles of Christ's Humanity in Salvation: Insights from Theodore of Mopsuestia
Theodore of Mopsuestia was hailed in his lifetime as one of the outstanding theologians and bishops in the second half of the fourth and early fifth centuries. He was then and still is respected as the preeminent spokesperson for the School of Antioch's unwavering defense of Christ's full humanity and its exegetical approach to the Scriptures. But within ten years after his death in 428, his enemies began to attack him openly, eventually succeeding in condemning both his works and person at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. He has since been declared by some as the ""Father of Nestorianism."" In this book, Frederick G. McLeod first establishes the principal influences that shaped Theodore's exegetical outlook. He then draws out the typology that Theodore sees present between Adam and Christ's humanity, exploring three major roles that Christ's humanity plays as the head of all human immortal existence, the bond of the universe, and the perfect image of God. Next McLeod shows how Theodore's customary word for Christ's ""person"" (prosopon) ought to be understood in a functional way. The book concludes by applying these insights to the 71 excerpts that were used to condemn Theodore at the Second Council of Constantinople and proposing that these passages can be interpreted in a different, non-heretical way. This book enables one to judge Theodore's christological statements in the wider context of how he conceives of Christ's roles in salvation. It establishes clearly how Christ can be said to be a true mediator between the Father and all creation. It also makes one aware of the communal dimensions and relationships contained in the notion of ""person."" Finally, it indicates how the body plays an essential role in human and cosmic salvation.
£80.00
Johns Hopkins University Press Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette
Helen Hopkins Thom-granddaughter of Johns Hopkins's older brother Joseph-began collecting material for this portrait when it was possible to talk to people who had actually known the founder of the Johns Hopkins University. Her research became of vital importance when it was discovered that Hopkins himself-owing to a deep sense of humility-had destroyed virtually all of his papers before he died in 1873. First published in 1929, this biography still stands as the authoritative account of Hopkins's life, his business career, and the motives that lay behind his decision to leave his fortune to establish a university and hospital. Thom tells the story of Johns Hopkins's family, including the origin of his unusual first name (originally the surname of his great-grandmother). She traces his life from his childhood on the family tobacco plantation to his rise as a merchant and banker who became the largest stockholder of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Thom portrays a man of principle-an abolitionist and Union supporter in a divided city-who found himself at odds with his Quaker faith. He disagreed with them about temperance, trading in whiskey and enjoying fine wine and champagne. Forbidden to marry the only woman he ever loved-his first cousin Elizabeth-he remained a lifelong bachelor. Johns Hopkins died of pneumonia at the age of 78 on December 24, 1873. This volume includes his will and instructions to the trustees, in which he articulated his wishes for a school of medicine, a university press, an orphanage, and a school of nursing. Among his stipulations was that the hospital treat anyone, regardless of race, sex, age, or ability to pay. This reissued edition brings this compelling portrait to a new generation of readers.
£32.86
Rowman & Littlefield Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African Americans
Inspired by the O.J. Simpson case, Protecting Our Own explores the reasons behind the rise of the 'black protectionism' phenomenon and its implications for the future. Comparing the plight of the African American community to the melancholy lyrics but vibrant beat of the blues, Russell-Brown uses the lyrics of these songs to paint a vivid picture of the African American community struggling through the burdens of racial oppression such as second tier status and lynchings solely due to the color of their skins. Russell-Brown explains the feelings of protectionism towards African American celebrities, as many African Americans feel that they have to 'protect their own' because no one else will. Many African Americans, Russell-Brown argues, feel that African American are still under siege and that the few lucky African Americans who find a way into the spotlight deserve a break. However, with more and more African Americans in the spotlight, this practice has new consequences. Protecting Our Own considers these issues in detail. The book sets out to accomplish three goals: to define Black protectionism, to explain how it works and how it can be reformulated to work in the best interests of the African American community. The book uses cases such as the infamous O.J. Simpson case to illustrate and explain the motivations behind black protectionism, even if the defendant is accused of grievous moral and ethical wrongdoing. Russell-Brown criticizes the use of black protectionism as a knee jerk reaction and expresses the need to hold African American celebrities accountable for their misdeeds. She suggests a selective approach to black protectionism that will benefit the African American community at large rather than just a lucky few. This book praises black protectionism at its best—a fight that will ensure racial justice in the future.
£38.02
University Press of Kansas America's Space Sentinels: The History of the DSP and SBIRS Satellite Systems
Originally published in 1999, America’s Space Sentinels won the American Astronautical Society’s prestigious Eugene Emme Astronautical Literature Award and quickly established itself as the definitive book for understanding a crucial component of the US national defence capabilities. It focused on the emergence and evolution of the Air Force’s Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite system, which came on line in 1970 and continued to perform at a high level through the turn of this century and beyond.For this new edition, Jeffrey Richelson covers significant developments during the last dozen years relating to the deployment of these satellites, especially the struggles to develop and launch the follow-on Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS), beginning in the late 1990s and continuing up to the present. The result is a book that remains the first and best source of information regarding these vital programs. As Richelson notes, SBIRS, like its aging but still functioning predecessor, has been designed primarily to provide instant early warning of missile launches from around the globe—particularly China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, India and Iran—through the infra-red sensors carried on each satellite. But the new system—beset by hardware, software, fiscal, and political problems—has only managed to move forward in fits and starts. While it has done so, the DSP system has continued to monitor the skies above the earth; two key ground stations in Australia and Germany have closed; nuclear powers Russia and the United States conferred extensively over the so-called Y2K problem (concerned that a computer malfunction might produce false alarms of a missile attack); and worries over potential launches from nations perceived as hostile to American interests have increased substantially.
£34.41
The University of Chicago Press Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling
A revealing and authoritative history that shows how Soviet whalers secretly helped nearly destroy endangered whale populations, while also contributing to the scientific understanding necessary for these creatures' salvation. The Soviet Union killed over 600,000 whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today's oceans. In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction. As other countries-especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway-expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission's rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today's cetacean studies benefitted from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country's whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling-not long before the world's whales might have disappeared altogether.
£24.00
James Currey Land, Governance, Conflict and the Nuba of Sudan
The conflict in the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan illustrates how state policies concerning the control of land can cause local conflicts to escalate into large scale wars, which become increasingly difficult to manage or resolve. The conventional perspective on Sudan's recent civil war (1983-2005) - one of the longest and most complex conflicts in Africa - emphasises ethnicity as the main cause. This study, on the contrary, identifies the land factor as aroot cause that is central to understanding Sudan's local conflicts and large-scale wars. Land rights are about relationships between and among persons, pertaining to different economic and ritual activities. Rights toland are intimately tied to membership in specific communities, from the family to the nation-state. Control over land in Africa has been, and still is, used as a means of defining identity and belonging, an instrument to control, and a source of, political power. Membership of these communities is contested, negotiable, and changeable over time. For national governments land is a national economic resource for public and private development, but the interests and rights of rural majorities and their sedentary or nomadic subsistence forms of life are often difficult to harmonise with land policies pursued by national governments. The state's exclusionary land policies and politicsof limiting or denying communities their land rights play a crucial role in causing local conflicts that then can escalate into large-scale wars. Land issues increase the complexity of a conflict, thereby reducing the possibilityof managing, resolving, or ultimately transforming it. The conflict in the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan, the regional focus in this study, is living proof of this transformation. Guma Kunda Komey is Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Juba University, Sudan.
£75.00
John Blake Publishing Ltd The Baby Thief: The True Story of the Woman Who Sold Over Five Thousand Neglected, Abused and Stolen Babies in the 1950s.
Drawing on extensive interviews and correspondence with many of Tann's surviving victims, Barbara Raymond shows how Tann not only popularised adoption - which until then had been feared and discouraged - but also commercialised and corrupted it. She tells how Tann abducted babies or coerced women to leave their children in her care and then sold them. To cover her kidnapping crimes she falsified birth certificates, a practice that was approved by legislators who believed it would spare adoptees the taint of illegitimacy - an one that still holds today in the form of 'amended' birth certificates and closed adoption records. Uncovering many life-shattering stories along the way, Raymond recounts how Tann openly sold more that 5,000 children, and killed so many through neglect that Memphis's infant mortality rate soared to the highest in the country. She explores how Tann's operation was able to thrive in a Tennessee governed by 'Boss' Ed Crump and the political network that allowed her to operate with impunity. And she portrays the lack of options available to women, affecting not only the birth mothers she robbed, but also Tann herself, who turned to social work after having been barred for a 'masculine profession' - the law. Written by an adoptive mother, The Baby Thief is part social history, part detective story, and part expose. It is a riveting investigative narrative that explores themes that continue to reverberate in the modern era, when baby sellers operate overseas. It is particularly relevant at this time in the UK, amidst heated national debate over the controversial adoption targets that seem to provide a perverse incentive to remove babies from birth parents.
£9.99
Little, Brown & Company Who Do I Think I Am?: Stories of Chola Wishes and Caviar Dreams
You may know Anjelah Johnson-Reyes for her viral sketch "Nail Salon" (over 100 million views globally) or her beloved MadTV character Bon Qui Qui, but it's her clean humor and hilarious storytelling that make her one of the most successful stand-up comedians and actresses today. With her razor-sharp wit, Anjelah recounts funny stories from her journey-from growing up caught between two worlds (do chips and salsa go with potato salad?) to unexpectedly embracing faith ("I love Jesus, but I will punch a 'ho") to her many adventures in dating (she may or may not have accepted dates simply for the food). Through it all, Anjelah transforms from a suburban-adjacent kid with Aquanet-drenched hair into a devoted Christian who abstains from drinking and premarital sex, into a mall-famous Oakland Raiders cheerleader, and then an actually famous comedian traveling the world and meeting people from all-walks of life, including Oprah. No biggie. (Huge biggie.) As she travels the world, Anjelah has eye-opening experiences, and she morphs from square, rigid Anjelah into "Funjelah," and learns that she can still ride with Jesus without squashing the other parts of her personality.Anjelah's stories explore subjects such as navigating your racial identity, finding your place in the world, chasing your crazy dreams, embracing the messiness of an evolving faith, and searching for belonging and meaning. Through her journey, Anjelah gets closer to discovering her true identity and encourages readers to have the audacity to dream big.
£22.00
University of Minnesota Press The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil
An important new ethnographic study of São Paulo’s favelas revealing the widespread use of race-based police repression in Brazil While Black Lives Matter still resonates in the United States, the movement has also become a potent rallying call worldwide, with harsh police tactics and repressive state policies often breaking racial lines. In The Anti-Black City, Jaime Amparo Alves delves into the dynamics of racial violence in Brazil, where poverty, unemployment, residential segregation, and a biased criminal justice system create urban conditions of racial precarity. The Anti-Black City provocatively offers race as a vital new lens through which to view violence and marginalization in the supposedly “raceless” São Paulo. Ironically, in a context in which racial ambiguity makes it difficult to identify who is black and who is white, racialized access to opportunities and violent police tactics establish hard racial boundaries through subjugation and death. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in prisons and neighborhoods on the periphery of this mega-city, Alves documents the brutality of police tactics and the complexity of responses deployed by black residents, including self-help initiatives, public campaigns against police violence, ruthless gangs, and self-policing of communities.The Anti-Black City reveals the violent and racist ideologies that underlie state fantasies of order and urban peace in modern Brazil. Illustrating how “governing through death” has become the dominant means for managing and controlling ethnic populations in the neoliberal state, Alves shows that these tactics only lead to more marginalization, criminality, and violence. Ultimately, Alves’s work points to a need for a new approach to an intractable problem: how to govern populations and territories historically seen as “ungovernable.”
£22.99
Cornell University Press A Fiery Gospel: The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Road to Righteous War
Since its composition in Washington's Willard Hotel in 1861, Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" has been used to make America and its wars sacred. Few Americans reflect on its violent and redemptive imagery, drawn freely from prophetic passages of the Old and New Testaments, and fewer still think about the implications of that apocalyptic language for how Americans interpret who they are and what they owe the world. In A Fiery Gospel, Richard M. Gamble describes how this camp-meeting tune, paired with Howe's evocative lyrics, became one of the most effective instruments of religious nationalism. He takes the reader back to the song's origins during the Civil War, and reveals how those political and military circumstances launched the song's incredible career in American public life. Gamble deftly considers the idea behind the song—humming the tune, reading the music for us—all while reveling in the multiplicity of meanings of and uses to which Howe's lyrics have been put. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" has been versatile enough to match the needs of Civil Rights activists and conservative nationalists, war hawks and peaceniks, as well as Europeans and Americans. This varied career shows readers much about the shifting shape of American righteousness. Yet it is, argues Gamble, the creator of the song herself—her Abolitionist household, Unitarian theology, and Romantic and nationalist sensibilities—that is the true conductor of this most American of war songs. A Fiery Gospel depicts most vividly the surprising genealogy of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and its sure and certain position as a cultural piece in the uncertain amalgam that was and is American civil religion.
£24.99
Johns Hopkins University Press Leaving without Losing: The War on Terror after Iraq and Afghanistan
As the United States withdraws its combat troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, politicians, foreign policy specialists, and the public are worrying about the consequences of leaving these two countries. Neither nation can be considered stable, and progress toward democracy in them-a principal aim of America and the West-is fragile at best. But, international relations scholar Mark N. Katz asks: Could ending both wars actually help the United States and its allies to overcome radical Islam in the long term? Drawing lessons from the Cold War, Katz makes the case that rather than signaling the decline of American power and influence, removing military forces from Afghanistan and Iraq puts the U.S. in a better position to counter the forces of radical Islam and ultimately win the war on terror. He explains that since both wars will likely remain intractable, for Washington to remain heavily involved in either is counter-productive. Katz argues that looking to its Cold War experience would help the U.S. find better strategies for employing America's scarce resources to deal with its adversaries now. This means that, although leaving Afghanistan and Iraq may well appear to be a victory for America's opponents in the short term-as was the case when the U.S. withdrew from Indochina-the larger battle with militant Islam can be won only by refocusing foreign and military policy away from these two quagmires. This sober, objective assessment of what went wrong in the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ways the West can disentangle itself and still move forward draws striking parallels with the Cold War. Anyone concerned with the future of the War on Terror will find Katz's argument highly thought provoking.
£23.00
Simon & Schuster Ltd Dork Diaries: Party Time
Welcome to Nikki Maxwell's aDORKable world in the second book in the mega-selling Dork Diaries series – now with over 50 million copies in print worldwide!Nikki is finally adjusting to life at her new school: she's made some real friends and her major crush, Brandon, has even asked to be her science partner! But when Nikki overhears mean girl Mackenzie bragging about going to the Halloween dance with Brandon, she's gutted and decides to go to her little sister's party instead. Then she discovers Mackenzie was lying. Could her dream of going to the party with Brandon still come true? With a HUGE global fanbase, Dork Diaries is the perfect series for fans of Lottie Brooks, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Tom Gates. Don’t miss out! I LOVE PARIS, the brand new DORK DIARIES, is out now! Have you read all the DORK DIARIES series?Dork Diaries Dork Diaries 2: Party Time Dork Diaries 3: Pop Star Dork Diaries 4: Skating Sensation Dork Diaries 5: Dear Dork Dork Diaries 6: Holiday Heartbreak Dork Diaries 7: TV Star Dork Diaries 8: Once Upon a Dork Dork Diaries 9: Drama Queen Dork Diaries 10: Puppy Love Dork Diaries 11: Frenemies Forever Dork Diaries 12: Crush Catastrophe Dork Diaries 13: Birthday Drama Dork Diaries 14: Spectacular Superstar Dork Diaries 15: I Love Paris! - Out now!
£7.99
John Wiley & Sons Inc Macs For Dummies
Take a bite out of all your Mac has to offer with this bestselling guide So, you joined the cool kids club and bought a Mac. Kudos! Now, do you dare admit to your sophisticated Mac mates that you still need some help figuring out how it works? No worries, Macs For Dummies is here to help! In full color for the first time ever, the latest edition of this long-running bestseller takes the guesswork out of working with your new Mac, providing easy-to-follow, plain-English answers to every possible question in the book! Whether you're trying to figure out the basics of getting around the OS X interface, learning the ins and outs of turning your Mac into a sleek productivity tool, or anything in between, Mac For Dummies makes it fast and easy to navigate your way around your new Apple computer. You'll get the know-how to rocket into cyberspace, browse the Web, send messages, back up files to the Cloud, deal with security issues, get productive with leading Mac apps, and have fun with one-stop shopping for music, movies, and media. Navigate OS X El Capitan with confidence and ease Use your Mac to power your audio and video systems Add your Mac to your home network Troubleshoot common problems when your Mac starts misbehaving Fully updated to cover the latest hardware and software releases, Macs For Dummies offers everything you need to get your geek on—and make your Mac your minion.
£23.39
Taylor & Francis Inc Medication Treatments for Nicotine Dependence
Despite the prevalence of both pharmaceutical and behavioral approaches to encourage cessation, over a billion people still indulge in tobacco. Even in the U.S., where tobacco use is considered a clearly treatable and socially regrettable condition, a significant percentage of individuals remain resistant to treatment modalities. It is believed that the problem lies with the availability, the effectiveness, and the tolerance of the treatments. Thus, the development of new and more effective medications for treating nicotine dependence is an area of significant therapeutic importance, and one made increasingly more viable given our rapidly increasing knowledge about the actions of nicotine and tobacco components on the brain.“We are entering a Renaissance period … that promises to provide us with improved pharmacological tools to tackle this most serious of worldwide public health problems.” -- from the Preface Medication Treatments for Nicotine Dependence assembles contributions from leading researchers and clinicians to provide the most comprehensive volume on current and future possibilities for addressing nicotine and tobacco dependence with medication. Organized into six sections, this important work covers— Basic pharmacology and physiology of nicotine and nicotinic receptors First-line medications for nicotine addiction, including NRTs and sustained release bupropion Second-line medications including antidepressants, inhibitors, and antagonists Promising treatments currently in development Special topics such as the combination of medications with behavioral treatments and pharmacogenetic approaches to treatment The text concludes with the presentation of two unique perspectives on the development of medications for nicotine dependence and its implications for clinical practice. Medication Treatments for Nicotine Dependence serves as a useful primer and resource for established investigators, as well as those new to the research; for students from a range of disciplines, including pharmacology, psychology, public health, and medicine; and for those clinicians actively engaged in the treatment of nicotine dependence.
£200.00
Fordham University Press X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought
X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought offers an original account of matters African American, and by implication the African diaspora in general, as an object of discourse and knowledge. It likewise challenges the conception of analogous objects of study across dominant ethnological disciplines (e.g., anthropology, history, and sociology) and the various forms of cultural, ethnic, and postcolonial studies. With special reference to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Chandler shows how a concern with the Negro is central to the social and historical problematization that underwrote twentieth-century explorations of what it means to exist as an historical entity—referring to their antecedents in eighteenth-century thought and forward into their ongoing itinerary in the twenty-first century. For Du Bois, “the problem of the color line” coincided with the inception of a supposedly modern horizon. The very idea of the human and its avatars—the idea of race and the idea of culture—emerged together with the violent, hierarchical inscription of the so-called African or Negro into a horizon of commonness beyond all natal premises, a horizon that we can still situate with the term global. In ongoing struggles with the idea of historical sovereignty, we can see the working out of then new concatenations of social and historical forms of difference, as both projects of categorical differentiation and the irruption of originary revisions of ways of being. In a word, the world is no longer—and has never been—one. The world, if there is such—from the inception of something like “the Negro as a problem for thought”— could never be, only, one. The problem of the Negro in “America” is thus an exemplary instance of modern historicity in its most fundamental sense. It renders legible for critical practice the radical order of an ineluctable and irreversible complication at the heart of being—its appearance as both life and history—as the very mark of our epoch.
£25.19
University of Pennsylvania Press The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait
The epic battle for control of the Strait of Gibraltar waged by Castile, Morocco, and Granada in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is a major, but often overlooked, chapter in the history of the Christian reconquest of Spain. After the Castilian conquest of Seville in 1248 and the submission of the Muslim kingdom of Granada as a vassal state, the Moors no longer loomed as a threat and the reconquest seemed to be over. Still, in the following century, the Castilian kings, prompted by ideology and strategy, attempted to dominate the Strait. As self-proclaimed heirs of the Visigoths, they aspired not only to reconstitute the Visigothic kingdom by expelling the Muslims from Spain but also to conquer Morocco as part of the Visigothic legacy. As successive bands of Muslims over the centuries had crossed the Strait from Morocco into Spain, the kings of Castile recognized the strategic importance of securing Algeciras, Gibraltar, and Tarifa, the ports long used by the invaders. At a time when European enthusiasm for the crusade to the Holy Land was on the wane, the Christian struggle for the Strait received the character of a crusade as papal bulls conferred the crusading indulgence as well as ancillary benefits. The Gibraltar Crusade had mixed results. Although the Castilians seized Gibraltar in 1309 and Algeciras in 1344, the Moors eventually repossessed them. Only Tarifa, captured in 1292, remained in Castilian hands. Nevertheless, the power of the Marinid dynasty of Morocco was broken at the battle of Salado in 1340, and for the remainder of the Middle Ages Spain was relieved of the threat of Moroccan invasion. While the reconquest remained dormant during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, the last Muslim outpost in Spain, in 1492. In subsequent years Castile fulfilled its earlier aspirations by establishing a foothold in Morocco.
£32.40
University of Nebraska Press The Four Hills of Life: Northern Arapaho Knowledge and Life Movement
For many generations the Northern Arapaho people thrived over a vast area of the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains. For more than a century they have lived on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. The reservation, the fourth largest in the country, is surrounded by vast rural lands and has been largely ignored by outsiders. As a result, the Northern Arapahos have been in some ways more isolated from mainstream American society than most Native groups. In The Four Hills of Life Jeffrey D. Anderson masterfully draws together many different aspects of the Northern Arapahos' world—myth, language, art, ritual, identity, and history—to offer a compelling picture of a culture that has endured and changed over time. Arapaho culture is seen dynamically through the ways that members of the community in the past and present experience their unique world in everyday life. Anderson shows that Northern Arapaho unity and identity from the nineteenth century through today are derived less from political centralization than from a shared system of ritual practices. The heart of this system is a complex of rituals called the beyoowu'u ("all the lodges"), which includes the Offerings Lodge, now more commonly known as the Sun Dance—a ritual still central to Northern Arapaho life. According to Anderson, the beyoowu'u and other life transition ceremonies work together to mold time and experience for the Arapahos, a life movement that also helps create social identities and transmit vital cultural knowledge. Anderson also offers an in-depth study of the problems that Euro-American society continues to impose on reservation life and the empowered responses of the Northern Arapahos to these problems.
£26.99
Cornell University Press Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military Empire after World War II
By the end of World War II, many black citizens viewed service in the segregated American armed forces with distaste if not disgust. Meanwhile, domestic racism and Jim Crow, ongoing Asian struggles against European colonialism, and prewar calls for Afro-Asian solidarity had generated considerable black ambivalence toward American military expansion in the Pacific, in particular the impending occupation of Japan. However, over the following decade black military service enabled tens of thousands of African Americans to interact daily with Asian peoples—encounters on a scale impossible prior to 1945. It also encouraged African Americans to share many of the same racialized attitudes toward Asian peoples held by their white counterparts and to identify with their government's foreign policy objectives in Asia. In Black Yanks in the Pacific, Michael Cullen Green tells the story of African American engagement with military service in occupied Japan, war-torn South Korea, and an emerging empire of bases anchored in those two nations. After World War II, African Americans largely embraced the socioeconomic opportunities afforded by service overseas—despite the maintenance of military segregation into the early 1950s—while strained Afro-Asian social relations in Japan and South Korea encouraged a sense of insurmountable difference from Asian peoples. By the time the Supreme Court declared de jure segregation unconstitutional in its landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, African American investment in overseas military expansion was largely secured. Although they were still subject to discrimination at home, many African Americans had come to distrust East Asian peoples and to accept the legitimacy of an expanding military empire abroad.
£36.00
Quarto Publishing PLC Making A Masterpiece: The stories behind iconic artworks
What makes a work of art a masterpiece? Discover the answers in the fascinating stories of how these artworks came to be and the circumstances of their long-lasting impact on the world. Beginning with Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, we travel through time and a range of styles and stories – including theft, scandal, artistic reputation, politics and power – to Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, challenging the idea of what a masterpiece can be, and arriving in the twenty-first century with Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama, a modern-day masterpiece still to be tested by time. Each artwork has a tale that reveals making a masterpiece often involves much more than just a demonstration of artistic skill: their path to fame is only fully disclosed by looking beyond what the eye can see. Rather than trying to describe the elements of greatness, Making a Masterpiece takes account of the circumstances outside the frame that contribute to the perception of greatness and reveals that the journey from the easel to popular acclaim can be as compelling as the masterpiece itself.Featuring:Birth of Venus, Sandro BotticelliMona Lisa, Leonardo da VinciJudith Beheading Holofernes, Artemisia GentileschiGirl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes VermeerUnder the Wave off Kanagawa, Katsushika HokusaiFifteen Sunflowers, Vincent van GoghPortrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (Woman in Gold, Gustav KlimtAmerican Gothic, Grant WoodGuernica, Pablo PicassoSelf-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, Frida KahloCampbell’s Soup Cans, Andy WarholMichelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, Amy Sherald Discover the stories of how, why and what makes a masterpiece in this compelling and comprehensive title.
£19.80
Princeton University Press Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders
The surprising story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson came to despair for the future of the nation they had createdAmericans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—came to deem America’s constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. Fears of a Setting Sun is the first book to tell the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders’ disillusionment.As Dennis Rasmussen shows, the founders’ pessimism had a variety of sources: Washington lost his faith in America’s political system above all because of the rise of partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was too weak, Adams because he believed that the people lacked civic virtue, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions laid bare by the spread of slavery. The one major founder who retained his faith in America’s constitutional order to the end was James Madison, and the book also explores why he remained relatively optimistic when so many of his compatriots did not. As much as Americans today may worry about their country’s future, Rasmussen reveals, the founders faced even graver problems and harbored even deeper misgivings.A vividly written account of a chapter of American history that has received too little attention, Fears of a Setting Sun will change the way that you look at the American founding, the Constitution, and indeed the United States itself.
£15.99
Harvard University Press Heathen: Religion and Race in American History
An innovative history that shows how the religious idea of the heathen in need of salvation undergirds American conceptions of race.If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between “civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far,” the words would hardly come as a shock. But that statement was written by an American missionary in 1971. In a sweeping historical narrative, Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the heathen has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses—discourses, specifically, of race.Americans long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term “heathen” fell out of common use by the early 1900s, leading some to imagine that racial categories had replaced religious differences. But the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as “other” due to their assumed need for conversion to American ways. Purported heathens have also contributed to the ongoing significance of the concept, promoting solidarity through their opposition to white American Christianity. Gin Lum looks to figures like Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo and Ihanktonwan Dakota writer Zitkála-Šá, who proudly claimed the label of “heathen” for themselves.Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans’ sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth.
£27.86
University of California Press The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next
A provocative rethinking of how humans and fire have evolved together over time—and our responsibility to reorient this relationship before it's too late.The Pyrocene tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet. Some fire uses have been direct: fire applied to convert living landscapes into hunting grounds, forage fields, farms, and pastures. Others have been indirect, through pyrotechnologies that expanded humanity's reach beyond flame's grasp. Still, preindustrial and Indigenous societies largely operated within broad ecological constraints that determined how, and when, living landscapes could be burned. These ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass—lithic landscapes—and humanity's firepower became unbounded. Fire-catalyzed climate change globalized the impacts into a new geologic epoch. The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene. Around fires, across millennia, we have told stories that explained the world and negotiated our place within it. The Pyrocene continues that tradition, describing how we have remade the Earth and how we might recover our responsibilities as keepers of the planetary flame.
£20.70
University of California Press Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela
Beginning in the late 1950s political leaders in Venezuela built what they celebrated as Latin America's most stable democracy. But outside the staid halls of power, in the gritty barrios of a rapidly urbanizing country, another politics was rising unruly, contentious, and clamoring for inclusion. Based on years of archival and ethnographic research in Venezuela's largest public housing community, Barrio Rising delivers the first in-depth history of urban popular politics before the Bolivarian Revolution, providing crucial context for understanding the democracy that emerged during the presidency of Hugo Chavez. In the mid-1950s, a military government bent on modernizing Venezuela razed dozens of slums in the heart of the capital Caracas, replacing them with massive buildings to house the city's working poor. The project remained unfinished when the dictatorship fell on January 23, 1958, and in a matter of days city residents illegally occupied thousands of apartments, squatted on green spaces, and renamed the neighborhood to honor the emerging democracy: the 23 de Enero (January 23). During the next thirty years, through eviction efforts, guerrilla conflict, state violence, internal strife, and official neglect, inhabitants of el veintitres learned to use their strategic location and symbolic tie to the promise of democracy in order to demand a better life. Granting legitimacy to the state through the vote but protesting its failings with violent street actions when necessary, they laid the foundation for an expansive understanding of democracy both radical and electoral whose features still resonate today. Blending rich narrative accounts with incisive analyses of urban space, politics, and everyday life, Barrio Rising offers a sweeping reinterpretation of modern Venezuelan history as seen not by its leaders but by residents of one of the country's most distinctive popular neighborhoods.
£22.50
John Wiley & Sons Inc Condensed Matter Physics
Now updated—the leading single-volume introduction to solid state and soft condensed matter physics This Second Edition of the unified treatment of condensed matter physics keeps the best of the first, providing a basic foundation in the subject while addressing many recent discoveries. Comprehensive and authoritative, it consolidates the critical advances of the past fifty years, bringing together an exciting collection of new and classic topics, dozens of new figures, and new experimental data. This updated edition offers a thorough treatment of such basic topics as band theory, transport theory, and semiconductor physics, as well as more modern areas such as quasicrystals, dynamics of phase separation, granular materials, quantum dots, Berry phases, the quantum Hall effect, and Luttinger liquids. In addition to careful study of electron dynamics, electronics, and superconductivity, there is much material drawn from soft matter physics, including liquid crystals, polymers, and fluid dynamics. Provides frequent comparison of theory and experiment, both when they agree and when problems are still unsolved Incorporates many new images from experiments Provides end-of-chapter problems including computational exercises Includes more than fifty data tables and a detailed forty-page index Offers a solutions manual for instructors Featuring 370 figures and more than 1,000 recent and historically significant references, this volume serves as a valuable resource for graduate and undergraduate students in physics, physics professionals, engineers, applied mathematicians, materials scientists, and researchers in other fields who want to learn about the quantum and atomic underpinnings of materials science from a modern point of view.
£116.00
Indiana University Press Metropolitan Railways: Rapid Transit in America
Early in the 19th century, growing American cities began to experience transportation problems. One solution was the horse-drawn streetcar, developed in 1832, but it soon proved inadequate. The first elevated train was transporting passengers above the streets of Manhattan by 1871; the first subway opened 25 years later in Boston; and similar systems soon followed in Philadelphia and Chicago. Rapid transit was confined to these few cities until after World War II, when a new generation of systems began to appear. In the 1970s, light rail became an economical alternative to conventional rapid transit. By century's end, some three dozen cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico operated metropolitan rapid transit or light rail systems that transported five billion urban passengers annually, and still more were under construction or planned. These diverse systems include elevated lines ranging from Chicago's "L" to the fully automatic Skytrain metro of Vancouver, B.C.; subways from New York City's thundering tunnels—the world's largest underground system—to the thoroughly modern metro of Guadalajara; and light rail from lovingly restored New Orleans streetcars to the sleek, articulated vehicles of Silicon Valley.Metropolitan Railways is a large-scale, extensively illustrated volume that deals with the growth and development of urban rail transit systems in North America. It traces the history of rail transit technology from such impractical early schemes as a proposed steam-powered "arcade railway" under New York's Broadway through today's sophisticated systems. Rapid transit enthusiasts as well as residents of cities that are potential candidates for rapid transit or light rail systems will find this book indispensable.
£29.70
Penguin Books Ltd Homer and His Iliad
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A thrilling study of the greatest of all epic poems, by one of the world's leading classicistsHomer's Iliad is the famous epic poem set among the tales of Troy. Its subject is the anger of the hero Achilles and its dreadful consequences for the warring Greeks and Trojans. It was composed more than 2,600 years ago, but still transfixes us with its tale of loss and battle, love and revenge, guided throughout by the active presence of the gods. Its beauty and profound bleakness are intensely moving but great questions remain: where, how and when it was composed and why it has such enduring power?In this compelling book Robin Lane Fox addresses these questions, drawing on a life-long love and engagement with the poem. He argues for a place, a date and a method for its composition, giving us a sense of alternative approaches and grounding his own in discoveries about long heroic poems composed elsewhere in the world, and the ever-growing evidence of archaeology.Unlike other books on the Iliad, this one combines the detailed expertise of a historian with the sensitivity of a teacher of it as poetry. Lane Fox goes on to consider hallmarks of the poem, its values, implicit and explicit, its characters, its women, its gods and even its horses. He argues repeatedly for its beautiful observation and addresses its parallel use of what is, to us, the natural world. Thousands of readers turn to the Iliad every year. In this superbly written and conceived tribute, Lane Fox expresses and amplifies what old and new readers can find in it. It is pervaded, he argues, by a poignant hardness which is not just a poetic trick. It is a deeply held view of the world.
£27.00
Columbia University Press Origins of Darwin's Evolution: Solving the Species Puzzle Through Time and Place
Historical biogeography—the study of the history of species through both time and place—first convinced Charles Darwin of evolution. This field was so important to Darwin’s initial theories and line of thinking that he said as much in the very first paragraph of On the Origin of Species (1859) and later in his autobiography. His methods included collecting mammalian fossils in South America clearly related to living forms, tracing the geographical distributions of living species across South America, and sampling peculiar fauna of the geologically young Galápagos Archipelago that showed evident affinities to South American forms. Over the years, Darwin collected other evidence in support of evolution, but his historical biogeographical arguments remained paramount, so much so that he devotes three full chapters to this topic in On the Origin of Species.Discussions of Darwin’s landmark book too often give scant attention to this wealth of evidence, and we still do not fully appreciate its significance in Darwin’s thinking. In Origins of Darwin’s Evolution, J. David Archibald explores this lapse, showing how Darwin first came to the conclusion that, instead of various centers of creation, species had evolved in different regions throughout the world. He also shows that Darwin’s other early passion—geology—proved a more elusive corroboration of evolution. On the Origin of Species has only one chapter dedicated to the rock and fossil record, as it then appeared too incomplete for Darwin’s evidentiary standards. Carefully retracing Darwin’s gathering of evidence and the evolution of his thinking, Origins of Darwin’s Evolution achieves a new understanding of how Darwin crafted his transformative theory.
£22.50
The University of Chicago Press The Making of Environmental Law
The unprecedented expansion in environmental regulation over the past thirty years—at all levels of government—signifies a transformation of our nation's laws that is both palpable and encouraging. Environmental laws now affect almost everything we do, from the cars we drive and the places we live to the air we breathe and the water we drink. But while enormous strides have been made since the 1970s, gaps in the coverage, implementation, and enforcement of the existing laws still leave much work to be done.In The Making of Environmental Law, Richard J. Lazarus offers a new interpretation of the past three decades of this area of the law, examining the legal, political, cultural, and scientific factors that have shaped—and sometimes hindered—the creation of pollution controls and natural resource management laws. He argues that in the future, environmental law must forge a more nuanced understanding of the uncertainties and trade-offs, as well as the better-organized political opposition that currently dominates the federal government. Lazarus is especially well equipped to tell this story, given his active involvement in many of the most significant moments in the history of environmental law as a litigator for the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, an assistant to the Solicitor General, and a member of advisory boards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Environmental Defense Fund.Ranging widely in his analysis, Lazarus not only explains why modern environmental law emerged when it did and how it has evolved, but also points to the ambiguities in our current situation. As the field of environmental law "grays" with middle age, Lazarus's discussions of its history, the lessons learned from past legal reforms, and the challenges facing future lawmakers are both timely and invigorating.
£28.78
Verso Books We're Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire
What are the origins of the hostile environment for immigrants in Britain? Drawing on new archival material from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ian Sanjay Patel retells Britain's recent history in an often shocking account of state racism that still resonates today. In a series of post-war immigration laws, Britain's colonial and Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa were renamed immigrants. In the late 1960s, British officials drew upon an imperial vision of the world to contain what it saw as a vast immigration 'crisis' involving British citizens, passing legislation to block their entry. As a result, British citizenship itself was redefined along racial lines, fatally compromising the Commonwealth and exposing the limits of Britain's influence in world politics. Combining voices of so-called immigrants trying to make a home in Britain and the politicians, diplomats and commentators who were rethinking the nation, Ian Sanjay Patel excavates the reasons why Britain failed to create a post-imperial national identity. The reactions of the British state to post-war immigration reflected the shift in world politics from empires to decolonization. Despite a new international recognition of racial equality, Britain's colonial and Commonwealth citizens were subject to a new regime of immigration control based on race. From the Windrush generation who came to Britain from the Caribbean to the South Asians who were forced to migrate from East Africa, Britain was caught between attempting both to restrict the rights of its non-white colonial and Commonwealth citizens and redefine its imperial role in the world. Despite Britain's desire to join Europe, which eventually occurred in 1973, its post-imperial moment never arrived, subject to endless deferral and reinvention.
£20.00
JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck) Karl Popper and the Two New Secrets of Life: Including Karl Popper's Medawar Lecture 1986 and Three Related Texts
The story of how humans and all living things came into existence is told in two widely believed versions: the Book of Genesis and Darwin's Origin of Species. It was the philosopher Karl Popper who presented us with a third story, no less important. His New Interpretation of Darwinism denies the creative power of blind chance and natural selection and establishes knowledge and activity of all living beings as the real driving forces of evolution. Thus, spiritual elements are back in the theory of evolution, and in Popper's view "the entire evolution is an adventure of the mind."In this book, Hans-Joachim Niemann establishes Karl Popper as an eminent philosopher of biology. In the first chapter, biographical details are unearthed concerning how Popper's biological interests were inspired by a biological meeting in the old windmill at Hunstanton in 1936. The second chapter focusses on the year 1986 when Popper, in several lectures, summarized the results of his life-long biological thinking. The most important of these, the Medawar Lecture given at the Royal Society London, was lost for a long time and is now printed in the Appendix. A new world view begins to emerge that is completely different from Creationism or Darwinism.Twenty years after Popper's death, the last chapter looks back on his biological thoughts in the light of new results of molecular biology. His attack at that time on long-lasting dogmas of evolutionary theory turned out to be largely justified. The new biology seems even well suited to support Popper's endeavour to overcome the gloomy aspects of Darwinism that have made organisms passive parts of a machinery of deadly competition. Neither blind chance nor natural selection are the creative forces of all life, but rather knowledge and activity. How they came into existence is still a secret and a worthwhile research programme.
£53.10
Lawrence & Wishart Ltd Communism and Democracy: History, debates and potentials
On the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Mike Makin-Waite surveys the history of the communist movement, tracking its origins in the Enlightenment, and through nineteenth-century socialism to the emergence of Marxism and beyond. As we emerge from the long winter of neoliberalism, and the search is on for ideas that can help shape a contemporary popular socialism, some of the questions that have preoccupied socialist thinkers throughout left history are once more being debated. Should the left press for reform and work through the state or should it focus on protest and a critique of the whole system? Is it possible to expand the liberal idea of democracy to include economic democracy? Which alliances require too great a compromise and which can help secure future change? Arguments on questions such as these have been raging since the mid-nineteenth century, and were the basis of the split between Social Democrats and Communists in the aftermath of the First World War. Mike Makin-Waite believes that revisiting these debates can help us to avoid some of the mistakes made in the past, and find new solutions to some of these age-old concerns. His argument is that the democratic and liberal counter-currents that have always existed within the communist movement have much to offer the left project today. This unorthodox account therefore tracks an alternative history that includes nineteenth-century revisionists such as Karl Kautsky, Menshevik opponents of Bolshevik oppression in 1917, Popular Front critiques of sectarianism in the 1930s, communist support for 1968’s Prague Spring, and the turn to Gramsci and Eurocommunism in the 1970s. The aim of Communism and Democracy: history, debates and potentials is to recover some of the hard-won insights of the critical communist tradition, in the belief that they can still be of service to the twenty-first-century left.
£18.00
Nova Science Publishers Inc Barakoa (Masks) During COVID-19: Malevolent Pathogens and Pandemic Responses in Kenya After 600 Days
On 2 November 2021, Kenya marked 600 days since the first COVID-19 case was identified and diagnosed in the country, 'imported' by a returning traveller from the US by way of London, UK. Since then, Kenya progressively took steps and implemented strategies at the individual, governmental, public health, societal and international levels to combat the pandemic. Some of the strategies mirrored those adopted elsewhere: curfews, lockdowns, masking, social-distancing, closure of high-contact areas such as educational and religious institutions, and political activity, banned by the government but still widely practised. This book examines the trajectory of COVID-19 in the country, the various responses that the government and the public have undertaken, how socio-cultural, political and religious beliefs and practices have affected contagion and constrained stopping its spread and assesses the impact of the pandemic on different constituencies. It focuses on the peculiar circumstances of the Kenyan society, such as high dependence on public transportation, religious affiliation, boarding educational institutions and political rallies in the context of the 2022 general elections in August 2022, and the superficiality of the responses. It also examines the progress and the setbacks that have manifested as a result of the gendered nature of the pandemic, work and societal beliefs, practices and strategies. This book illustrates one of the most peculiar habits adopted by Kenyans: the government mandated masks, but Kenyans, either disbelieving their effectiveness or unconcerned with the pandemics seriousness, took to hanging a mask around the chin only so as to comply with the rules (and not potentially part with a bribe if caught by the police without a mask), or borrowing masks from others at the sight of police. The book also highlights the challenges of a vaccine-sceptic public and overreactions by government, implementing very little testing and requiring vaccinations in order for citizens to access government services, despite the availability being marginal.
£127.79
Nova Science Publishers Inc Politics of Gender in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq: Resource Curse, Tribalism and Political Culture
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the establishment of close relations between the West and the Kurds after 2003, there has been an increase in the demand towards reading and learning about this ethnic group. However, while in Western countries, there is substantial literature on the politics of gender, giving a deeper insight into the role that women play in the field, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), women rarely come up as a topic of discussion. This trend has also affected the literary works that detail their role in social and political affairs. Little has been written to establish the position in politics and their unexploited potential. On the other hand, in Iraq and in the Middle East at large, the Iraqi Kurdish society has made significant strides towards modernization and observation of the rule of law and governance in line with international standards. The National Action Plan and the Declaration of the Elimination of Violence against Women among others are the documents that are binding over Kurdistan to work towards ensuring the rights of women and their participation in politics. However, whether the contents of these documents on the involvement of women in the political landscape and respect for their rights are being honoured or just remain on paper is still debatable. With a focus on these issues, this book examines the politics of gender in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, delving into the regional phenomena (ie: resource curse, tribalism, religion, elitist feminism, and political culture). Using a mixed-methods approach, this book also acts as a pointer to how the country regards women even in the private spheres, including in the civil society level. Understanding the challenges that women face in articulating and shaping their interests and the place of tribal structure of the society and religion besides the oil economy that lead to gender inequality in political, social, and economic spheres is important towards helping them increase their representation in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).
£127.79
Institute of Economic Affairs Training Too Much?: Sceptical Look at the Economics of Skill Provision in the UK
There is still a consensus that British workers are unskilled in relation to their foreign counterparts and a considerable increase in government expenditure on training is needed if our relative economic performance is to be improved. This consensus exists even though it is difficult to find any positive correlation between the resources a country devotes to training and its rate of economic growth. State expenditure on training has risen from less than GBP1 billion in 1978 to nearly GBP3 billion by 1991 without any thought being given to the economic principles which should govern such expenditure. As a result, a large government-funded training industry has emerged, depending significantly on increased contributions from the taxpayer. If there has been a market failure in training, is it legitimate to argue that more money ought to be spent centrally? It is possible that the government is already spending too much on training or is diverting expenditure into the wrong channels. Unless there is clear evidence of the extent of market failure, we cannot judge whether the government is doing too much or too little to assist training provision. Education and training are vital to the economic prosperity of a nation but whenever government action is suggested as a remedy for market failure, the extent to which government fails should also be considered. Governments do have a powerful incentive to be seen helping the labour market at times of high unemployment but we should be sceptical of those who claim to know the labour market's training needs better than the individuals and firms involved. First published in 1992, the issues raised in this controversial publication are perennial. Shackleton's robust economic analysis of the economics of training ensure this books contemporary relevance.
£10.65
Prometheus Books The Phantom God: What Neuroscience Reveals about the Compulsion to Believe
Does neuroscience have anything to say about religious belief or the existence of God? Some have tried to answer this question, but, in doing so, most have strayed from the scientific method. In The Phantom God, computational biologist and neuroscientist John C. Wathey, Ph.D., tackles this problem head-on, exploring religious feelings not as the direct perception by the brain of some supernatural realm, nor as the pathological misfiring of neurons, but as a natural consequence of how our brains are wired.Unlike other neurobiological studies of religion and spirituality, The Phantom God treats mysticism not as something uniquely human and possibly supernatural in origin, but as a completely natural phenomenon that has behavioral and evolutionary roots that can be traced far back into our vertebrate ancestry. Grounded in evolutionary and behavioral biology, this highly original and compelling book takes the reader on a journey through the neural circuitry of crying, innate knowledge, reinforcement learning, emotional bonding, embodiment, interpersonal perception, and the ineffable feeling of certainty that characterizes faith.Wathey argues that the feeling of God’s presence is spawned by innate neural circuitry, similar to the mechanism that compels an infant to cry out for its mother. In an adult, this circuitry can be activated under conditions that mimic the extreme desperation and helplessness of infancy, generating the compelling illusion of the presence of a loving, powerful, and all-knowing savior. When seen from this perspective, the illusion also appears remarkably like one that has long been familiar to neurologists: the phantom limb of the amputee, spawned by the expectation of the patient’s brain that the missing limb should still be there. Including a primer on the basic concepts and terminology of neuroscience, The Phantom God details the neural mechanisms behind the illusions and emotions of spiritual experience.
£22.50