Search results for ""the university of chicago press""

For decades, Woodrow Wilson has been remembered as either a paternalistic liberal or reactionary conservative at home and as a na ve idealist or cynical imperialist abroad. Historians' harsh judgments of Wilson are understandable. He won two elections by promising a deliberative democratic process that would ensure justice and political empowerment for all. Yet under Wilson, Jim Crow persisted, interventions in Latin America increased, and a humiliating peace settlement was forced upon Germany. A generation after Wilson, stark inequalities and injustices still plagued the nation, myopic nationalism hindered its responsible engagement in world affairs, and a second vastly destructive global conflict threatened the survival of democracy worldwide leaving some Americans today to wonder what, exactly, the buildings and programs bearing his name are commemorating. In Power without Victory, Trygve Throntveit argues that there is more to the story of Wilson than these sad truths. Throntveit makes the case that Wilson was not a "Wilsonian," as that term has come to be understood, but a principled pragmatist in the tradition of William James. He did not seek to stamp American-style democracy on other peoples, but to enable the gradual development of a genuinely global system of governance that would maintain justice and facilitate peaceful change a goal that, contrary to historical tradition, the American people embraced. In this brilliant intellectual, cultural, and political history, Throntveit gives us a new vision of Wilson, as well as a model of how to think about the complex relationship between the world of ideas and the worlds of policy and diplomacy.

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From the end of the nineteenth century until the onset of the Great Depression, Wall Street embarked on a stunning, unprecedented, and often bloody period of international expansion in the Caribbean. The precursors to institutions like Citibank and JPMorgan Chase, as well as a host of long-gone and lesser-known financial entities, sought to push out their European rivals so that they could control banking, trade, and finance in the region. In the process, they not only trampled local sovereignty, grappled with domestic banking regulation, and backed US imperialism but they also set the model for bad behavior by banks, visible still today. In Bankers and Empire, Peter James Hudson tells the provocative story of this period, taking a close look at both the institutions and individuals who defined this era of American capitalism in the West Indies. Whether in Wall Street minstrel shows or in dubious practices across the Caribbean, the behavior of the banks was deeply conditioned by bankers' racial views and prejudices. Drawing deeply on a broad range of sources, Hudson reveals that the banks' experimental practices and projects in the Caribbean often led to embarrassing failure, and, eventually, literal erasure from the archives. Bankers and Empire is a groundbreaking book, one which will force readers to think anew about the relationship between capitalism and race.

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Few books have had the social, cultural, and scholarly impact of John Boswell's "Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality". Arguing that neither the Bible nor the Christian tradition was nearly as hostile to homocroticism as was generally thought, its initial publication sent shock waves through university classrooms, gay communities, and religious congregations. Twenty-five years later, the aftershocks still reverberate. "The Boswell Thesis" brings together fifteen leading scholars at the intersection of religious and sexuality studies to comment on this book's immense impact, the endless debates it generated, and the many contributions it has made to our culture. The essays in this magnificent volume examine a variety of aspects of Boswell's interpretation of events in the development of sexuality from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, including a Roman emperor's love letters to another man; suspicions of sodomy among medieval monks, knights, and crusaders; and the gender-bending visions of Christian saints and mystics. Also included are discussions of Boswell's career, including his influence among gay and lesbian Christians and his role in academic debates between essentialists and social constructionists. Elegant and thought-provoking, this collection provides a fitting twenty-fifth anniversary tribute to the incalculable influence of "Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality" and its author.

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Whatever you think about the widening divide between Democrats and Republicans, ideological differences do not explain why politicians from the same parties, who share the same goals and policy preferences, often argue fiercely about how best to attain them. This perplexing misalignment suggests that we are missing an important piece of the puzzle. Political scientists have increasingly drawn on the relationship between voters' personalities and political orientation, but there has been little empirically grounded research looking at how legislators' personalities influence their performance on Capitol Hill. With More Than a Feeling, Adam J. Ramey, Jonathan D. Klingler, and Gary E. Hollibaugh, Jr. have developed an innovative framework incorporating what are known as the Big Five dimensions of personality openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism to improve our understanding of political behavior among members of Congress. To determine how strongly individuals display these traits, the authors identified correlates across a wealth of data, including speeches, campaign contributions and expenditures, committee involvement, willingness to filibuster, and even Twitter feeds. They then show how we might expect to see the influence of these traits across all aspects of Congress members' political behavior from the type and quantity of legislation they sponsor and their style of communication to whether they decide to run again or seek a higher office. They also argue convincingly that the types of personalities that have come to dominate Capitol Hill in recent years may be contributing to a lot of the gridlock and frustration plaguing the American political system.

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From the fights about the teaching of evolution to the details of sex education, it may seem like American schools are hotbeds of controversy. But as Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson show in this insightful book, it is precisely because such topics are so inflammatory outside school walls that they are so commonly avoided within them. And this, they argue, is a tremendous disservice to our students. Armed with a detailed history of the development of American educational policy and norms and a clear philosophical analysis of the value of contention in public discourse, they show that one of the best things American schools should do is face controversial topics dead on, right in their classrooms. Zimmerman and Robertson highlight an aspect of American politics that we know all too well: We are terrible at having informed, reasonable debates. We opt instead to hurl insults and accusations at one another or, worse, sit in silence and privately ridicule the other side. Wouldn't an educational system that focuses on how to have such debates in civil and mutually respectful ways improve our public culture and help us overcome the political impasses that plague us today? To realize such a system, the authors argue that we need to not only better prepare our educators for the teaching of hot-button issues, but also provide them the professional autonomy and legal protection to do so. And we need to know exactly what constitutes a controversy, which is itself a controversial issue. The existence of climate change, for instance, should not be subject to discussion in schools: scientists overwhelmingly agree that it exists. How we prioritize it against other needs, such as economic growth, however that is worth a debate. With clarity and common-sense wisdom, Zimmerman and Robertson show that our squeamishness over controversy in the classroom has left our students woefully underserved as future citizens. But they also show that we can fix it: if we all just agree to disagree, in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

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The idea of staging a nation dates from the Enlightenment, but the full force of the idea emerges only with the rise of mass politics. Comparing English, French, and American attempts to establish national theatres at moments of political crisis—from the challenge of socialism in late nineteenth-century Europe to the struggle to "salvage democracy" in Depression America—Kruger poses a fundamental question: in the formation of nationhood, is the citizen-audience spectator or participant? The National Stage answers this question by tracing the relation between theatre institution and public sphere in the discourses of national identity in Britain, France, and the United States. Exploring the boundaries between history and theory, text and performance, this book speaks to theatre and social historians as well as those interested in the theoretical range of cultural studies.

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The challenge of overcoming educational inequality in the United States can sometimes appear overwhelming, and great controversy exists as to whether or not elementary schools are up to the task, whether they can ameliorate existing social inequalities and initiate opportunities for economic and civic flourishing for all children. This book shows what can happen when you rethink schools from the ground up with precisely these goals in mind, approaching educational inequality and its entrenched causes head on, student by student. Drawing on an in-depth study of real schools on the South Side of Chicago, Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Lisa Rosen argue that effectively meeting the challenge of educational inequality requires a complete reorganization of institutional structures as well as wholly new norms, values, and practices that are animated by a relentless commitment to student learning. They examine a model that pulls teachers out of their isolated classrooms and places them into collaborative environments where they can share their curricula, teaching methods, and assessments of student progress with a school-based network of peers, parents, and other professionals. Within this structure, teachers, school leaders, social workers, and parents collaborate to ensure that every child receives instruction tailored to his or her developing skills. Cooperating schools share new tools for assessment and instruction and become sites for the training of new teachers. Parents become respected partners, and expert practitioners work with researchers to evaluate their work and refine their models for educational organization and practice. The authors show not only what such a model looks like but the dramatic results it produces for student learning and achievement. The result is a fresh, deeply informed, and remarkably clear portrait of school reform that directly addresses the real problems of educational inequality.

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Although the colonies in the West Indies were as important to the expanding British empire as those in North America, writings from the British West Indies have been conspicuously absent from anthologies of 17th- and 18th-century British literature. In this literary anthology dedicated to the region, Thomas W. Krise gathers descriptions, poems, narratives, satires and essays written in and about this culturally rich and politically tempestuous region. The text offers period commentaries on slavery, colonialism, gender relations, African and European history, natural history, agriculture and medicine. Highlights include several of the earliest protests against slavery; an ode by the Cambridge-educated Afro-Jamaican poet Francis Williams; James Grainger's extended georgic poem, "The Sugar Cane"; Frances Seymour's poignant tale of the Englishman Inkle who sells his Indian saviour-lover Yarico into slavery; and several descriptions of the West Indies during the early years of settlement.

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The 19th-century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna played a major role in the development of Hinduism and is regarded as a modern saint. Yet he remains an enigma to followers unable to reconcile his saintly status with his eroticized language and actions. In this work, Jeffrey J. Kripal attempts to untangle the paradox. He demonstrates that Ramakrishna's famous mystical experiences were driven by erotic energies that he neither fully accepted nor understood; the key to understanding him, Kripal argues, lies in Tantra and its ritual, symbolic and doctrinal equation of the mystical and the erotic. Moving through Ramakrishna's world both chronologically and conceptually, this book employs two complementary interpretive strategies: a nuanced phenomenological reinterpretation of original Bengali texts and a non-reductive psychoanalytic reading of Ramakrishna's mystical eroticism. Kripal shows how the heterosexual structure of Tantric symbolism, the abusive way its rituals were often forced upon the saint, and Ramakrishna's own homosexual desires all came together to produce in him profound feelings of shame, disgust and fear. Kripal establishes that the homosexuality of this great, if unwilling, Tantric mystic is linked inextricably to virtually every aspect of his life and teachings.

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For the last twenty years, the West African nation of Guinea has exhibited all the characteristics that have correlated with civil wars in other countries, and Guineans themselves regularly talk about the inevitability of war tearing their country apart. Yet the country has narrowly avoided civil conflict again and again. In A Socialist Peace?, Mike McGovern asks how this was possible, how a nation could beat the odds and evade civil war. All six of Guinea's neighbors have experienced civil war or separatist insurgency in the past twenty years. Guinea itself has similar makings for it. It is rich in resources, yet its people are some of the poorest in the world. Its political situation is polarized by fiercely competitive ethnic groups. Weapons flow freely through its lands and across its borders. And, finally, it is still recovering from the oppressive regime of Sekou Toure. Yet it is that aspect which McGovern points to: while Toure's reign was hardly peaceful, it was successful often through highly coercive and violent measures at establishing a set of durable national dispositions, which have kept the nation at peace. Exploring the ambivalences of contemporary Guineans toward the afterlife of Tour 's reign as well as their abiding sense of socialist solidarity, McGovern sketches the paradoxes that can undergird political stability.

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One of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's proudest accomplishments was his expansion of the Work Experience Program, which uses welfare recipients to do routine work once done by unionized city workers. The fact that WEP workers are denied the legal status of employees and make far less money and enjoy fewer rights than do city workers has sparked fierce opposition. For antipoverty activists, legal advocates, unions, and other critics of the program, this double standard leads to a troubling question: are workfare participants workers or welfare recipients? At times, the fight over workfare unfolded as an argument over who had the authority to define these terms, and in "Free Labor", John Krinsky focuses on changes in the language and organization of the political coalitions on both sides of the debate. Krinsky's broadly interdisciplinary analysis draws from interviews, official documents, and media reports to pursue new directions in the study of the cultural and cognitive aspects of political activism. "Free Labor" will instigate a lively dialogue among students of culture, labor and social movements, welfare policy, and urban political economy.

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Congress is crippled by ideological conflict. The political parties are more polarized today than at any time since the Civil War. Americans disagree, fiercely, about just about everything, from terrorism and national security, to taxes and government spending, to immigration and gay marriage. Well, American elites disagree fiercely. But average Americans do not. This, at least, was the position staked out by Philip Converse in his famous essay on belief systems, which drew on surveys carried out during the Eisenhower Era to conclude that most Americans were innocent of ideology. In Neither Liberal nor Conservative, Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe argue that ideological innocence applies nearly as well to the current state of American public opinion. Real liberals and real conservatives are found in impressive numbers only among those who are deeply engaged in political life. The ideological battles between American political elites show up as scattered skirmishes in the general public, if they show up at all. If ideology is out of reach for all but a few who are deeply and seriously engaged in political life, how do Americans decide whom to elect president; whether affirmative action is good or bad? Kinder and Kalmoe offer a persuasive group-centered answer. Political preferences arise less from ideological differences than from the attachments and antagonisms of group life.

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A little-discussed aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a mandate that requires failing schools to hire after-school tutoring companies - the largest of which are private, for-profit corporations - and to pay them with federal funds. "Making Failure Pay" takes a hard look at the implications of this new blurring of the boundaries between government, schools, and commerce in New York City, the country's largest school district. As Jill P. Koyama explains in this revelatory book, NCLB - a federally legislated, state-regulated, district-administered, and school-applied policy - explicitly legitimizes giving private organizations significant roles in public education. Based on her three years of ethnographic fieldwork, Koyama finds that the results are political and problematic - and highly profitable. Bringing to light these unproven, unregulated private companies' almost invisible partnership with the government, "Making Failure Pay" lays bare the unintended consequences of federal efforts to eliminate school failure - not the least of which is more failure.

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Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America's transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, "Capitalism Takes Command" presents a history of family farming, general incorporation laws, mortgage payments, inheritance practices, office systems, and risk management - an inventory of the means by which capitalism became America's new revolutionary tradition. This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past. As business ceaselessly revised its own practices, a new demographic of private bankers, insurance brokers, investors in securities, and start-up manufacturers, among many others, assumed center stage, displacing older elites and forms of property. Explaining how capital became an "ism" and how business became a political philosophy, "Capitalism Takes Command" brings the economy back into American social and cultural history.

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For over a century, philosophers have argued that philosophy is impossible or useless, or both. Although the basic notion dates back to the days of Socrates, there is still heated disagreement about the nature of truth, reality, knowledge, the good, and God. This leaves us with a feeling of radical uncertainty, a feeling described by Kolakowski as "metaphysical horror". "The horror is this" , he says, "if nothing truly exists except the Absolute, the Absolute is nothing; if nothing truly exists except myself, I am nothing". The aim of this book, for Kolakowski, is finding a way out of this seeming dead end. This book confronts these dilemmas through examinations of prominent Western philosophers including Descartes, Spinoza, Husserl, and many of the Neo-Platonists. He argues that philosophy may not provide definitive answers to the fundamental questions, yet the quest itself transforms our lives. It may undermine most of our certainties, yet it still leaves room for our spiritual yearnings and religious beliefs.

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"The ethnography of Japan is currently being reshaped by a new generation of Japanologists, and the present work certainly deserves a place in this body of literature. . . . The combination of utility with beauty makes Kondo's book required reading, for those with an interest not only in Japan but also in reflexive anthropology, women's studies, field methods, the anthropology of work, social psychology, Asian Americans, and even modern literature."—Paul H. Noguchi, American Anthropologist"Kondo's work is significant because she goes beyond disharmony, insisting on complexity. Kondo shows that inequalities are not simply oppressive-they are meaningful ways to establish identities."—Nancy Rosenberger, Journal of Asian Studies

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Sigmund Koch (1917-1996) was one of the 20th century's most penetrating and wide-ranging critics of the scientistic ambitions of psychology. He decried any psychology that attempted to eradic ate the human dimension from the study, scientific and otherwise, of human experience and action. A philosopher and humanist by nature, Koch also sought to change the multifaceted field of psychology by moving it closer to the humanities and arts. The broad scope of essays in text which began as the basis for the eagerly anticipated postscript to Koch's seminal "Psychology: A Study of a Science" reveal his writings to be as fresh and relevant today as ever. Carefully edited by two of Koch's close associates, this collection places psychological and philosophical issues in the context of 20th-century thought and provides intellectual and moral signposts for future travellers in what Koch regarded as the irreducibly rich and human realm of the psychological studies.

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In just over a decade, mobile phones have become part of everyday life almost everywhere, radically transforming how we access and exchange information. Many have argued that in Africa, where most have gone from no phone to mobile phone, this improved access to technology and information will usher in socio-economic development, changing everything from health services to electoral participation to engagement with the global economy. With Mobile Secrets, Julie Soleil Archambault reveals how better access to information is not necessarily a good thing, and offers a complete rethinking of how we understand uncertainty, truth, and ignorance. By engaging with young adults in a Mozambique suburb who have adopted mobile phones in their daily lives, Archambault shows that they have become necessary tools for pretense and falsification, allowing youths not only to mitigate but also court, produce, and sustain uncertainty in their efforts to create fulfilling lives in the harsh world of postwar Mozambique. She explores how telecommunication opens up new virtual spaces of sociality in which people can imagine and enact alternate lives. As Mobile Secrets shows, new technologies have not only facilitated access to information in Mozambique, but they have also helped mute social conflicts, allowing everyone to feign ignorance about the workings of the postwar intimate economy.

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In just over a decade, mobile phones have become part of everyday life almost everywhere, radically transforming how we access and exchange information. Many have argued that in Africa, where most have gone from no phone to mobile phone, this improved access to technology and information will usher in socio-economic development, changing everything from health services to electoral participation to engagement with the global economy. With Mobile Secrets, Julie Soleil Archambault reveals how better access to information is not necessarily a good thing, and offers a complete rethinking of how we understand uncertainty, truth, and ignorance. By engaging with young adults in a Mozambique suburb who have adopted mobile phones in their daily lives, Archambault shows that they have become necessary tools for pretense and falsification, allowing youths not only to mitigate but also court, produce, and sustain uncertainty in their efforts to create fulfilling lives in the harsh world of postwar Mozambique. She explores how telecommunication opens up new virtual spaces of sociality in which people can imagine and enact alternate lives. As Mobile Secrets shows, new technologies have not only facilitated access to information in Mozambique, but they have also helped mute social conflicts, allowing everyone to feign ignorance about the workings of the postwar intimate economy.

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Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility. Exploring this phenomenon, The Medieval Invention of Travel draws on an impressive array of sources to develop original readings of canonical figures such as Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and Petrarch, as well as a host of lesser-known travel writers. As Shayne Aaron Legassie demonstrates, the Middle Ages inherited a Greco-Roman model of heroic travel, which viewed the ideal journey as a triumph over temptation and bodily travail. Medieval travel writers revolutionized this ancient paradigm by incorporating practices of reading and writing into the ascetic regime of the heroic voyager, fashioning a bold new conception of travel that would endure into modern times. Engaging methods and insights from a range of disciplines, The Medieval Invention of Travel offers a comprehensive account of how medieval travel writers and their audiences reshaped the intellectual and material culture of Europe for centuries to come.

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Individuals are things that everybody knows or thinks they do. Yet even scholars who practice or analyze the biological sciences often cannot agree on what an individual is and why. One reason for this disagreement is that the many important biological individuality concepts serve very different purposes defining, classifying, or explaining living structure, function, interaction, persistence, or evolution. Indeed, as the contributors to Biological Individuality reveal, nature is too messy for simple definitions of this concept, organisms too quirky in the diverse ways they reproduce, function, and interact, and human ideas about individuality too fraught with philosophical and historical meaning. Bringing together biologists, historians, and philosophers, this book provides a multifaceted exploration of biological individuality that identifies leading and less familiar perceptions of individuality both past and present, what they are good for, and in what contexts. Biological practice and theory recognize individuals at myriad levels of organization, from genes to organisms to symbiotic systems. We depend on these notions of individuality to address theoretical questions about multilevel natural selection and Darwinian fitness; to illuminate empirical questions about development, function, and ecology; to ground philosophical questions about the nature of organisms and causation; and to probe historical and cultural circumstances that resonate with parallel questions about the nature of society. Charting an interdisciplinary research agenda that broadens the frameworks in which biological individuality is discussed, this book makes clear that in the realm of the individual, there is not and should not be a direct path from biological paradigms based on model organisms through to philosophical generalization and historical reification.

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Latin America is a concept firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and historical meanings. And yet, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo argues in this landmark book, it is an obsolescent racial-cultural idea that ought to have vanished long ago with the banishment of racial theory. Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea makes this case persuasively. Tenorio-Trillo builds the book on three interlocking steps: first, an intellectual history of the concept of Latin America in its natural historical habitat mid-nineteenth-century redefinitions of empire and the cultural, political, and economic intellectualism; second, a serious and uncompromising critique of the current "Latin Americanism" which circulates in United States based humanities and social sciences; and, third, accepting that we might actually be stuck with "Latin America," Tenorio-Trillo charts a path forward for the writing and teaching of Latin American history. Accessible and forceful, rich in historical research and specificity, the book offers a distinctive, conceptual history of Latin America and its many connections and intersections of political and intellectual significance. Tenorio-Trillo's book is a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship.

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In music studies, Timothy D. Taylor is known for his insightful essays on music, globalization, and capitalism. Music and the World is a collection of some of Taylor's most recent writings essays concerned with questions about music in capitalist cultures, covering a historical span that begins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continues to the present. These essays look at shifts in the production, dissemination, advertising, and consumption of music from the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century to the globalized neoliberal capitalism of the past few decades. In addition to chapters on music, capitalism, and globalization, Music and the World includes previously unpublished essays on the continuing utility of the culture of concept in the study of music, a historicization of treatments of affect, and an essay on value and music. Taken together, Taylor's essays chart the changes in different kinds of music in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music and culture from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

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Life is not what it used to be. In the final years of the twentieth century, emigres from engineering and computer science devoted themselves to biology and made a resolution: that if the aim of biology is to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation. Armed with the latest biotechnology techniques, these scientists treated biological media as elements for design and manufacture: viruses named for computers, bacterial genomes encoding passages from James Joyce, chimeric yeast buckling under the metabolic strain of genes harvested from wormwood, petunias, and microbes from Icelandic thermal pools. In Synthetic: How Life Got Made, cultural anthropologist Sophia Roosth reveals how synthetic biologists make new living things in order to understand better how life works. The first book-length ethnographic study of this discipline, Synthetic documents the social, cultural, rhetorical, economic, and imaginative transformations biology has undergone in the post-genomic age. Roosth traces this new science from its origins at MIT to start-ups, laboratories, conferences, and hackers' garages across the United States even to contemporary efforts to resurrect extinct species. Her careful research reveals that rather than opening up a limitless new field, these biologists' own experimental tactics circularly determine the biological features, theories, and limits they fasten upon. Exploring the life sciences emblematic of our time, Synthetic tells the origin story of the astonishing claim that biological making fosters biological knowing.

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"Renewal" is a holistic health center run by baby boomers whose political ideals were shaped by the counterculture movements of the 1960s. Through interviews and observation, Sherryl Kleinman takes us inside Renewal and shows us how its members struggled to maintain a view of themselves as progressive and alternative even as they sought conventional legitimacy. In this volume we meet the members of Renewal as individuals; learn about the differences in power, prestige, and respect they are accorded; why they talked endlessly about money; and how they related to each other. Kleinman shows how members' attempts to see themselves as unconventional, but also as serious operators of a legitimate health care organization, led them to act in ways that undermined their egalitarian goals. She draws out the lessons Renewal offers for understanding the problems women face in organizations, the failure of social movements to live up to their ideals, and how it is possible for progressives to avoid reproducing the inequalities they claim to oppose.

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It is perhaps our noblest cause, and certainly one of our oldest: to end suffering. Think of the Buddha, Chuang Tzu, or Marcus Aurelius: stoically composed figures impervious to the torments of the wider world, living their lives in complete serenity and teaching us how to do the same. After all, isn't a life free from suffering the ideal? Isn't it what so many of us seek? Absolutely not, argues Todd May in this provocative but compassionate book. In a moving examination of life and the trials that beset it, he shows that our fragility, our ability to suffer, is actually one of the most important aspects of our humanity. May starts with a simple but hard truth: suffering is inevitable. At the most basic level, we suffer physically a sprained ankle or a bad back. But we also suffer insults and indifference. We suffer from overburdened schedules and unforeseen circumstances, from moral dilemmas and emotional heartaches. Even just thinking about our own mortality the fact that we only live one life can lead us to tremendous suffering. No wonder philosophies such as Buddhism, Taosim, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism all of which counsel us to rise above these plights have had appeal over the centuries. May highlights the tremendous value of these philosophies and the ways they can guide us toward better lives, but he also exposes a major drawback to their tenets: such invulnerability is too emotionally disengaged from the world, leading us to place too great a distance between ourselves and our experience. Rather than seeking absolute immunity, he argues most of us just want to hurt less and learn how to embrace and accept what suffering we do endure in a meaningful way. Offering a guide on how to positively engage suffering, May ultimately lays out a new way of thinking about how we exist in the world, one that reassures us that our suffering, rather than a failure of physical or psychological resilience, is a powerful and essential part of life itself.

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Since its publication in 1989, "The Human Career" has proved to be an indispensable tool in teaching human origins. This substantially revised third edition retains Richard G. Klein's innovative approach while showing how cumulative discoveries and analyses over the past ten years have significantly refined our knowledge of human evolution. Klein chronicles the evolution of people from the earliest primates through the emergence of fully modern humans within the past 200,000 years. His comprehensive treatment stresses recent advances in knowledge, including, for example, ever more abundant evidence that fully modern humans originated in Africa and spread from there, replacing the Neanderthals in Europe and equally archaic people in Asia. With its coverage of both the fossil record and the archaeological record over the 2.5 million years for which both are available, "The Human Career" demonstrates that human morphology and behavior evolved together. Throughout the book, Klein presents evidence for alternative points of view but does not hesitate to make his own position clear. In addition to outlining the broad pattern of human evolution, "The Human Career" details the kinds of data that support it. For the third edition, Klein has added numerous tables and a fresh citation system designed to enhance readability, especially for students. He has also included more than fifty new illustrations to help lay readers grasp the fossils, artifacts, and other discoveries on which specialists rely. With abundant references and hundreds of images, charts, and diagrams, this new edition is unparalleled in its usefulness for teaching human evolution.

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More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950--Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts'kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pal Teleki--Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind these influential maps. Taking us deep into cartographical archives, Seegel recreates the public and private worlds of these five mapmakers, who interacted with and influenced one another even as they played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations--and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two World Wars. Throughout, he examines the transnational nature of these processes and addresses weighty questions about the causes and consequences of the World Wars, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons why East Central Europe became the fault line of these worldchanging developments. At a time when East Central Europe has surged back into geopolitical consciousness, Map Men offers a timely and important look at the historical origins of how the region was defined--and the key people who helped define it.

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Even today, in an era of cheap travel and constant connection, the image of young people backpacking across Europe remains seductively romantic. In Backpack Ambassadors, Richard Ivan Jobs tells the story of backpacking in Europe in its heyday, the decades after World War II, revealing that these footloose young people were doing more than just exploring for themselves. Rather, with each step, each border crossing, each friendship, they were quietly helping knit the continent together. From the Berlin Wall to the beaches of Spain, the Spanish Steps in Rome to the Pudding Shop in Istanbul, Jobs tells the stories of backpackers whose personal desire for freedom of movement brought the people and places of Europe into ever-closer contact. As greater and greater numbers of young people trekked around the continent, and a truly international youth culture began to emerge, the result was a Europe that, even in the midst of Cold War tensions, found its people more and more connected, their lives more and more integrated. Drawing on archival work in eight countries and five languages, and featuring trenchant commentary on the relevance of this period for contemporary concerns about borders and migration, Backpack Ambassadors brilliantly recreates a movement that was far more influential and important than its footsore travelers could ever have realized.

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Over the past thirty years, the world's patent systems have experienced civil society pressure like never before. From farmers to patient advocates, new voices are arguing that patents impact public health, economic inequality, morality even democracy. These challenges, to domains that we usually consider technical and legal, seem odd. But in Patent Politics, Shobita Parthasarathy argues that patent systems have always been deeply political and social. To demonstrate this, Parthasarathy takes readers through a particularly fierce and prolonged set of controversies over patents on life forms linked to important advances in biology and agriculture as well as potentially life-saving medicines. Contrasting battles over patents on animals, human embryonic stem cells, human genes, and plants in the United States and Europe, she shows how political culture, ideology, and history shape patent system politics. Clashes over whose voices and what values matter in the patent system, as well as what counts as knowledge and whose expertise is important, look quite different in these two places. And through these debates, the United States and Europe are developing very different approaches to patent and innovation governance. Not just the first comprehensive look at the controversies swirling around biotechnology patents, Patent Politics is also the first in-depth analysis of the political underpinnings and implications of modern patent systems, and provides a timely analysis of how we can reform these systems around the world to maximize the public interest.

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The idea that a Senator Republican or Democrat would put the greater good of the country ahead of party seems nearly impossible to imagine in our current climate of gridlock and divisiveness. But this hasn't always been the case. Arthur H. Vandenberg (1884-1951), Republican from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the model of a consensus builder, and the coalitions he spearheaded continue to form the foundation of American foreign and domestic policy today. Edward R. Murrow called him "the central pivot of the entire era," yet, despite his significance, Vandenberg has never received the full public attention he is due until now. With this authoritative biography, Hendrik Meijer reveals how Vandenberg built and nurtured the bipartisan consensus that created the American Century. Originally the editor and publisher of the Grand Rapids Herald, Vandenberg was appointed and later elected to the Senate in 1928, where he became an outspoken opponent of the New Deal and a leader among the isolationists who resisted FDR's efforts to aid European allies at the onset of World War II.But Vandenberg soon recognized the need for unity at the dawn of a new world order; and as a Republican leader, he worked closely with Democratic administrations to build the strong bipartisan consensus that established the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and NATO. Vandenberg, as Meijer reveals, was instrumental in organizing Congressional support for these monumental twentieth-century foreign policy decisions. Vandenberg's life and career offer powerful lessons for today, and Meijer has given us a story that suggests an antidote to our current democratic challenges. After reading this poignant biography, many will ask: Where is the Vandenberg of today?

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The Green River, the most significant tributary of the Colorado River, runs 730 miles from the glaciers of Wyoming to the desert canyons of Utah. Over its course it meanders through ranches, cities, national parks, endangered fish habitats, and some of the most significant natural gas fields in the country, as it provides water for 33 million people. Stopped up by dams, slaked off by irrigation, and dried up by cities, the Green is crucial, overused, and at risk, now more than ever. Fights over the river's water, and what's going to happen to it in the future, are longstanding, intractable, and only getting worse as the west gets hotter and drier and more people depend on the river with each passing year. As a former raft guide and an environmental reporter, Heather Hansman knew these fights were happening, but she felt driven to see them from a different perspective-from the river itself. So she set out on a journey, in a one-person inflatable pack raft, to paddle the river from source to confluence and see what the experience might teach her. Mixing lyrical accounts of quiet paddling through breathtaking beauty with nights spent camping solo and lively discussions with farmers, city officials, and other people met along the way, Downriver is the story of that journey, a foray into the present-and future-of water in the west.

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We live in a time much like the postwar era. A time of arch political conservatism and vast social conformity. A time in which our nation's leaders question and challenge the patriotism of those who oppose their policies. But before there was Jon Stewart, Al Franken, or Bill Maher, there were Mort Sahl, Stan Freberg, and Lenny Bruce - liberal satirists who, through their wry and scabrous comedic routines, waged war against the political ironies, contradictions, and hypocrisies of their times. "Revel with a Cause" is their story. Stephen Kercher here provides the first comprehensive look at the satiric humor that flourished in the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s. Focusing on an impressive range of comedy - not just standup comedians of the day but also satirical publications like "MAD" magazine, improvisational theater groups such as Second City, the motion picture "Dr. Strangelove", and TV shows like "That Was the Week That Was" - Kercher reminds us that the postwar era saw varieties of comic expression that were more challenging and nonconformist than we commonly remember. His history of these comedic luminaries shows that for a sizeable audience of educated, middle-class Americans who shared such liberal views, the period's satire was a crucial mode of cultural dissent. For such individuals, satire was a vehicle through which concerns over the suppression of civil liberties, Cold War foreign policies, blind social conformity, and our heated racial crisis could be productively addressed. A vibrant and probing look at some of the most influential comedy of mid-twentieth-century America, "Revel with a Cause" belongs on the short list of essential books for anyone interested in the relationship between American politics and popular culture.

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Global events of the early twenty-first century have placed new stress on the relationship among anthropology, governance, and war. Facing prolonged insurgency, segments of the U.S. military have taken a new interest in anthropology, prompting intense ethical and scholarly debate. Inspired by these issues, the essays in "Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency" consider how anthropologists can, should, and do respond to military overtures, and they articulate anthropological perspectives on global war and power relations. This book investigates the shifting boundaries between military and civil state violence; perceptions and effects of American power around the globe; the history of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice; and, debate over culture, knowledge, and conscience in counterinsurgency. These wide-ranging essays shed new light on the fraught world of Pax Americana and on the ethical and political dilemmas faced by anthropologists and military personnel alike when attempting to understand and intervene in our world.

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Keil's classic account of blues and its artists is both a guide to the development of the music and a powerful study of the blues as an expressive form in and for African American life. This updated edition explores the place of the blues in artistic, social, political, and commercial life since the 1960s. "An achievement of the first magnitude...He opens our eyes and introduces a world of amazingly complex musical happening."--Robert Farris Thompson, Ethnomusicology

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We often think of finance as a glamorous world, a place where investment bankers amass huge profits in gleaming downtown skyscrapers. There's another side to finance, though the millions of amateurs who log on to their computers every day to make their own trades. The shocking truth, however, is that less than 2% of these amateur traders make a consistent profit. Why, then, do they do it? In Noise, Alex Preda explores the world of the people who trade even when by all measures they would be better off not trading. Based on firsthand observations, interviews with traders and brokers, and on international direct trading experience, Preda's fascinating ethnography investigates how ordinary people take up financial trading, how they form communities of their own behind their computer screens, and how electronic finance encourages them to trade more and more frequently. Along the way, Preda finds the answer to the paradox of amateur trading the traders aren't so much seeking monetary rewards in the financial markets, rather the trading itself helps them to fulfill their own personal goals and aspirations.

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Modern developed nations are rich and politically stable in part because their citizens are free to form organizations and have access to the relevant legal resources. Yet in spite of the advantages of open access to civil organizations, it is estimated that eighty percent of people live in countries that do not allow unfettered access. Why have some countries disallow the formation of organizations as part of their economic and political system? The contributions to Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development seek to answer this question through an exploration of how developing nations throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, made the transition to allowing their citizens the right to form organizations. The transition, contributors show, was not an easy one. Neither political changes brought about by revolution nor subsequent economic growth led directly to open access. In fact, initial patterns of change were in the opposite direction, as political coalitions restricted access to specific organizations for the purpose of maintaining political control. Ultimately, however, it became clear that these restrictions threatened the foundation of social and political order. Tracing the path of these modern civil societies, Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development is an invaluable contribution to all interested in today's developing countries and the challenges they face in developing this organizational capacity.

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Conundrums, puzzles, and perversities: these are Leo Katz's stock-in-trade, and in "Why the Law Is So Perverse", he focuses on four fundamental features of our legal system, all of which seem to not make sense on some level and to demand explanation. First, legal decisions are essentially made in an either/or fashion - guilty or not guilty, liable or not liable, either it's a contract or it's not - but reality is rarely that clear-cut. Why aren't there any in-between verdicts? Second, the law is full of loopholes. No one seems to like them, but somehow they cannot be made to disappear. Why? Third, legal systems are loath to punish certain kinds of highly immoral conduct while prosecuting other far less pernicious behaviors. What makes a villainy a felony? Finally, why does the law often prohibit what are sometimes called win-win transactions, such as organ sales or surrogacy contracts? Katz asserts that these perversions arise out of a cluster of logical difficulties related to multicriterial decision making. The discovery of these difficulties dates back to Condorcet's eighteenth-century exploration of voting rules, which marked the beginning of what we know today as social choice theory. Condorcet's voting cycles, Arrow's Theorem, Sen's Libertarian Paradox - every seeming perversity of the law turns out to be the counterpart of one of the many voting paradoxes that lie at the heart of social choice. Katz's lucid explanations and apt examples show why they resist any easy resolutions. "The New York Times Book Review" called Katz's first book "a fascinating romp through the philosophical side of the law". "Why the Law Is So Perverse" is sure to provide its readers a similar experience.

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The Western musical tradition has produced not only music but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous - and enormously influential-dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange. Ruth Katz argues that the indispensable relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. As ideas entered music from the contexts out of which it arose, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years. A magisterial exploration of this frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas.

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How can it be that rational adults suddenly find themselves making obscene gestures at drivers who just cut them off? Why do people react with tears to events as disparate as winning a sports championship and the death of a parent? How can a child cry continuously in a cunningly strategic manner for five minutes, and then speak with no trace of the tears that were just shed? Jack Katz develops methods for unravelling these mysteries. His book undertakes to answer the fundamental questions at the heart of our emotional life. Katz fills the book with real-life emotions - crying under the pressure of police interrogation, road rage on California freeways, laughter in a funhouse, 8-year-olds shamefacedly striking out at baseball games - where their rise and fall can be observed without the artificial influence of the research process. By using videotapes, interviews, ethnographic description, participant observation and the insights of novelists, Katz studies emotions as physical and embodied - vibrantly, "under the radar" of a person's perceptual reach - rather than as remembered and recounted. Katz illustrates his methods with photographs and video stills that demonstrate the embodiment of emotion. The portrait that emerges is one in which people are much more sensually, intimately and aesthetically bound up in the landscapes of their lives than previous scientific studies would suggest. The text seeks to reveal the poetic and coherent logic of emotional experience and revolutionize the study of this enigmatic and essential aspect of human life.

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This introductory text provides a thoroughly modern treatment of Fuchsian groups that addresses both the classical material and recent developments in the field. A basic example of lattices in semisimple groups, Fuchsian groups have extensive connections to the theory of a single complex variable, number theory, algebraic and differential geometry, topology, Lie theory, representation theory, and group theory.

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The Roman poet Statius called the Via Appia "the Queen of Roads," and for nearly a thousand years that description held true, as countless travelers trod its path from the center of Rome to the heel of Italy. Today, the road is all but gone, destroyed by time, neglect, and the incursions of modernity; to travel the Appian Way today is to be a seeker, to walk in the footsteps of ghosts. Our guide to those ghosts - and the layers of history they represent - is Robert A. Kaster. In "The Appian Way", he brings a lifetime of studying Roman literature and history to his adventures along the ancient highway. A footsore Roman soldier pushing the imperial power south; craftsmen and farmers bringing their goods to the towns that lined the road; pious pilgrims headed to Jerusalem, using stage-by-stage directions we can still follow - all come to life once more as Kaster walks (and drives - and suffers car trouble) on what's left of the Appian Way. Other voices help him tell the story: Cicero, Goethe, Hawthorne, Dickens, James, and even Monty Python offer commentary, insight, and curmudgeonly grumbles, their voices blending like the ages of the road to create a telescopic, perhaps kaleidoscopic, view of present and past. To stand on the remnants of the Via Appia today is to stand in the pathway of history. With "The Appian Way", Kaster invites us to close our eyes and walk with him back in time, to the campaigns of Garibaldi, the revolt of Spartacus, and the glory days of Imperial Rome. No traveler will want to miss this fascinating journey.

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Why is Congress mired in partisan polarization? The conventional answer is that members of Congress and their constituencies fundamentally disagree with one other along ideological lines. But Gregory Koger and Matthew J. Lebo uncover a more compelling reason that today's political leaders devote so much time to conveying their party's positions, even at the expense of basic government functions: Both parties want to win elections. In Strategic Party Government, Koger and Lebo argue that Congress is now primarily a forum for partisan competition. In order to avoid losing, legislators unite behind strong party leaders, even when they do not fully agree with the policies their party is advocating. They do so in the belief that party leaders and voters will reward them for winning or at least trying to win these legislative contests. And as the parties present increasingly united fronts, partisan competition intensifies and pressure continues to mount for a strong party-building strategy despite considerable disagreement within the parties. By bringing this powerful but underappreciated force in American politics to the forefront, Koger and Lebo provide a new interpretation of the problems facing Congress that is certain to reset the agenda for legislative studies.

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This book combines in one volume Irving Kaplansky's lecture notes on the theory of fields, ring theory, and homological dimensions of rings and modules.

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Where does the university begin and the "outside" end? How has literature become established as a separate domain within the university? Demonstrating that these questions of division are intricately related, Peggy Kamuf explores the space that the university devotes to the study of literature. Kamuf begins by analyzing the complex history of literary study within the modern university, critically reading developments from the French Revolution through the 19th century and beyond in Europe. She then turns to one of the most troubling works in the American literary canon - Melville's "The Confidence-Man" - to show how academic literary history has avoided confronting the implications of works in which meaning is never solely confined within a past.

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Sharp, resourceful, and with a style all her own, Althea Altemus embodied the spirit of the independent working woman of the Jazz Age. In her memoir, Big Bosses, she vividly recounts her life as a secretary for prominent (but thinly disguised) employers in Chicago, Miami, and New York during the late teens and 1920s. Alongside her we rub elbows with movie stars, artists, and high-profile businessmen, and experience lavish estate parties that routinely defied the laws of Prohibition. Beginning with her employment as a private secretary to James Deering of International Harvester, whom she describes as "probably the world's oldest and wealthiest bachelor playboy," Altemus tells us much about high society during the time, taking us inside Deering's glamorous Miami estate, Vizcaya, an Italianate mansion worthy of Gatsby himself. Later, we meet her other notable employers, including Samuel Insull, president of Chicago Edison; New York banker S. W. Straus; and real estate developer Fred F. French. We cinch up our trenchcoats and head out sleuthing in Chicago, hired by the wife of a big boss to find out how he spends his evenings (with, it turns out, a mistress hidden in an apartment within his office, no less). Altemus was also a struggling single mother, a fact she had to keep secret from her employers, and she reveals the difficulties of being a working woman at the time through glimpses into women's apartments, their friendships, and the dangers sexual and otherwise that she and others faced. Throughout, Altemus entertains with a tart and self-aware voice that combines the knowledge of an insider with the wit and clarity of someone on the fringe. Anchored by extensive annotation and an afterword from historian Robin F. Bachin, which contextualizes Altemus's narrative, Big Bosses provides a one-of-a-kind peek inside the excitement, extravagances, and the challenges of being a working woman roaring through the '20s.

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Drawn from the Prussian Academy edition of Kant's collected works, these letters make it possible to trace the development of Kant's thought from his earliest worries about the topics discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason to his attempts in later life to meet the objections of his critics and erstwhile disciples. "Perhaps the major value of these writings is their demonstration of Kant's own attitude towards his philosophical works."—Paul Arthur Schilpp, Saturday Review

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This is an examination into the reasons why crimes and accidents earn more news coverage than development and policy issues affecting thousands of people. Containing revealing interviews with both journalists and city officials, this is a comprehensive look at how the economic motives of media owners, professional motives of journalists, and the strategies of media-wise politicians shape the news we see and hear, thereby influencing urban policy.

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