Search results for ""university of chicago press""

Criminal justice expenditures have more than doubled since the 1980s, dramatically increasing costs to the public. With state and local revenue shortfalls resulting from the recent recession, the question of whether crime control can be accomplished either with fewer resources or by investing those resources in areas other than the criminal justice system is all the more relevant. "Controlling Crime" considers alternative ways to reduce crime that do not sacrifice public safety. Among the topics considered here are criminal justice system reform, social policy, and government policies affecting alcohol abuse, drugs, and private crime prevention. Particular attention is paid to the respective roles of both the private sector and government agencies. Through a broad conceptual framework and a careful review of the relevant literature, this volume provides insight into the important trends and patterns of some of the interventions that may be effective in reducing crime.

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The ideal of a neutral, objective press has proven in recent years to be just that - an ideal. In Governing with the News, Timothy E. Cook goes far beyond the single claim that the press is not impartial to argue that the news media are in fact a political institution integral to the day-to-day operations of our government. This updated edition includes a new afterword by the author that pays close attention to two key developments in the twenty-first century: the accelerating fragmentation of the mass media and the continuing decline of Americans' confidence in the press.

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By quadrupling the number of people behind bars in two decades, the United States has become the world leader in incarceration. Much has been written on the men who make up the vast majority of the nation's two million inmates. But what of the women they leave behind? "Doing Time Together" vividly details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiances, and boyfriends on the inside. Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prison's intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into quasi-inmates, eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives. An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America's massive prison system, Comfort's book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.

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Parasites are masterful works of evolutionary art. The tiny mite Hisliostoma laboratorium, a parasite of Drosophila, launches itself, in an incredible display of evolutionary engineering, like a surface-to-air missile at a fruit fly far above its head. Gravid mussels such as Lampsilis ventricosa undulate excitedly as they release their parasitic larval offspring, conning greedy predators in search of a tasty meal into hosting the parasite. The Art of Being a Parasite is an extensive collection of these and other wonderful and weird stories that illuminate the ecology and evolution of interactions between species. Claude Combes illustrates what it means to be a parasite by considering every stage of its interactions, from invading and reproducing to leaving the host. An accessible and engaging follow-up to Combes's Parasitism: The Ecology and Evolution of Intimate Interactions, this book will be of interest to both scholars and nonspecialists in the fields of biodiversity, natural history, ecology, public health, and evolution.

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The United States routinely has one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any developed democracy in the world. That rate is also among the most internally diverse, since the federal structure allows state-level variations in voting institutions that have had-and continue to have - sizable local effects. But are expansive institutional efforts like mailin registration, longer poll hours, and "no-excuse" absentee voting uniformly effective in improving voter turnout across states? With How the States Shaped the Nation, Melanie Jean Springer places contemporary reforms in historical context and explores how state electoral institutions have shaped voting behavior throughout the twentieth century. Although reformers often assume that more convenient voting procedures will produce equivalent effects wherever they are implemented, Springer reveals that this is not the case. In fact, convenience-voting methods have had almost no effect in the southern states where turnout rates are lowest. In contrast, the adverse effects associated with restrictive institutions like poll taxes and literacy tests have been persistent and dramatic. Ultimately, no single institutional fix will uniformly resolve problems of low or unequal participation. If we want to reliably increase national voter turnout rates, we must explore how states' voting histories differ.

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Latin American democracies of the 1960s and 1970s, most theories hold, collapsed because they had become incompatible with the structural requirements of capitalist development. In this application of game theory to political phenomena, Cohen argues that structural conditions in Latin American countries did not necessarily preclude the implementation of social and economic reforms within a democratic framework. Focusing on the experiences of Chile and Brazil, Cohen argues that what thwarted democratic reforms in Latin America was a classic case of "prisoner's dilemma". Moderates on the Left and the Right knew the benefits of coming to a mutual agreement of socioeconomic reforms. Yet each feared that, if it co-operated, the other side could gain by colluding with the radicals. Unwilling to take this risk, moderate groups in both countries splintered and joined the extremists. The resulting disorder opened the way for military control. Cohen further argues that, in general, structural explanations of political phenomena are inherantly flawed; they incorrectly assume that beliefs, preferences and actions are caused by social, political and economic structures. One cannot explain political outcomes, Cohen argues, without treating beliefs and preferences as partly independent from structures, and as having a causal force in their own right.

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Throughout the contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, politicians and voters alike worried that the outcome might depend on the preferences of unelected superdelegates. This concern threw into relief the prevailing notion that - such unusually competitive cases notwithstanding - people, rather than parties, should and do control presidential nominations. But for the past several decades, "The Party Decides" shows, unelected insiders in both major parties have effectively selected candidates long before citizens reached the ballot box.Tracing the evolution of presidential nominations since the 1790s, this volume demonstrates how party insiders have sought since America's founding to control nominations as a means of getting what they want from government. Contrary to the common view that the party reforms of the 1970s gave voters more power, the authors contend that the most consequential contests remain the candidates' fights for prominent endorsements and the support of various interest groups and state party leaders. These invisible primaries produce front-runners long before most voters start paying attention, profoundly influencing final election outcomes and investing parties with far more nominating power than is generally recognized.

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Wild parties, late nights, and lots of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many assume these are the things that define an American teenager's first year after high school. But the reality is quite different. As Tim Clydesdale reports in "The First Year Out", teenagers generally manage the increased responsibilities of everyday life immediately after graduation effectively. But, like many good things, this comes at a cost. Tracking the daily lives of fifty young people making the transition to life after high school, Clydesdale reveals how teens settle into controlled patterns of substance use and sexual activity; how they meet the requirements of postsecondary education; and how they cope with new financial expectations. Most of them, we learn, handle the changes well because they make a priority of everyday life. But Clydesdale finds that teens also stow away their identities - religious, racial, political, or otherwise - during this period in exchange for acceptance into mainstream culture. This results in the absence of a long-range purpose for their lives and imposes limits on their desire to understand national politics and global issues, sometimes even affecting the ability to reconstruct their lives when tragedies occur. "The First Year Out" is an invaluable resource for anyone caught up in the storm and stress of working with these young adults.

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In higher education, the United States is the preeminent global leader, dominating the list of the world's top research universities. But there are signs that America's position of global leadership will face challenges in the future, as it has in other realms of international competition. "American Universities in a Global Market" addresses the variety of issues crucial to understanding this challenge. The book examines the various factors that contributed to America's success in higher education, including openness to people and ideas, generous governmental support, and a tradition of decentralized friendly competition. By discussing the differences in quality among students and institutions around the world, this volume sheds light on the singular aspects of American higher education.

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This study examines the social origins of interest group politics in the USA. Between 1890 and 1925, a system centred on elections and party organizations was partially transformed by increasingly prominent legislative and administrative policy-making, and by the insistent participation of nonpartisan organizations, including farmers, workers and women, who invented strategies to circumvent the parties. Voters learned how to monitor legislative processes, to hold their representives accountable at the polls, and to institutionalize their ongoing participation in shaping policy. The text analyzes organizational politics in three American states, California, Washington and Wisconsin, seeking to demonstrate how the political opportunity structure of federalism allowed regional innovations to exert leverage on national political institutions.

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Uses the history of the university and reframes the Protestant Ethic to consider the conditions of knowledge production in the world. The author argues that the research university developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication.

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During the middle phase of his career, Guiseppe Verdi adopted new compositional procedures to create some of his best-known works. Focusing on the operas he composed during this period, this volume explores Verdi's work from three interlinked perspectives: studies of the original source material, cross-disciplinary analysis of musical and textual issues, and the relationship of performance practice to Verdi's musical and dramatic conception. In addition to offering new insights into operas such as "Il Trovatore", "La Traviata" and "Un Ballo in Maschera", this text also highlights works such as "Luisa Miller" and "Les Vepres Siciliennes".

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European and American scholars from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries thought that all societies passed through the same developmental stages, from primitive to advanced. Implicit in this developmental paradigm - one that has affected generations of thought-was the assumption that one could "read history sideways." That is, one could see what the earlier stages of a modern Western society looked like by examining contemporaneous so-called primitive societies in other parts of the world. In Reading History Sideways, Arland Thornton demonstrates how this approach, though long since discredited, has permeated Western ideas about the family. Further, its domination of social science for centuries caused the misinterpretation of Western trends in family, marriage, fertility, and parent-child relations. Revisiting the "developmental fallacy," Thornton traces its central role in changes in the Western world, from marriage to gender roles to adolescent sexuality. Through public policies, aid programs, and colonialism, it continues to reshape families in non-Western societies as well.

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To celebrate the centennial of Poetry, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman combed the magazine's vast archives to create a new kind of anthology, energized by a self-imposed limitation to one hundred poems. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive - or even to offer the most familiar works - they have assembled a collection of poems that, in their juxtapositions, echo across a century of poetry. The result is an anthology like no other, a celebration of idiosyncrasy and invention, a vital monument to an institution that refuses to be static, and most of all, a book that lovers of poetry will devour, debate, and keep close at hand.

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Conquered in 1492 and colonized by invading Castilians, the city and kingdom of Granada faced radical changes imposed by its occupiers throughout the first half of the sixteenth century - including the forced conversion of its native Muslim population. Written by Francisco Nunez Muley, one of Granada's New Christians, this extraordinary letter lodges a clear-sighted, impassioned protest against the unreasonable and strongly assimilationist laws that required all Granadans to dress, speak, eat, marry, celebrate festivals, and bury their dead exactly as the Castilian settler population did. Rendered into faithful English prose by Vincent Barletta, Nunez Muley's account is an invaluable example of how Granada's former Muslims made active use of the written word to challenge and openly resist the progressively intolerant policies of the Spanish Crown. Timely and resonant - given current debates concerning Islam, minorities, and cultural and linguistic assimilation - this edition provides scholars in a range of fields with a vivid and early example of resistance in the face of oppression.

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The concept of an encyclopedic museum was born of the enlightenment, a manifestation of European society's growing belief that the spread of knowledge, promotion of intellectual inquiry, and trust in individual agency were crucial to human development and the future of a rational society. But in recent years, encyclopedic museums have been under attack as little more than relics and promoters of imperialism. Could it be that the encyclopedic museum has outlived its usefulness? With Museums Matter, James Cuno, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust and former president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, replies with a resounding "No!" He takes us on a brief tour of the modern museum, from the creation of the British Museum - the archetypal encyclopedic collection - to the present, when major museums host millions of visitors annually and play a significant role in the cultural lives of their cities. Along the way, Cuno acknowledges the legitimate questions about the role of museums in nation building and imperialism, but he argues strenuously that even a truly national museum like the Louvre can't help but open visitors' eyes and minds to the wide diversity of world cultures and the stunning art that is our common heritage. Ultimately Cuno makes a powerful case for the encyclopedic museum as a truly cosmopolitan institution, promoting tolerance, understanding, and a shared sense of history-values that are essential in our ever more globalized age.

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In "Neoliberal Frontiers", Brenda Chalfin presents an ethnographic examination of the day-to-day practices of the officials of Ghana's Customs Service, exploring the impact of neoliberal restructuring and integration into the global economy on Ghanaian sovereignty. From the revealing vantage point of the customs office, Chalfin discovers a fascinating inversion of our assumptions about neoliberal transformation: bureaucrats and local functionaries, government offices, checkpoints, and registries are typically held to be the targets of reform, but Chalfin finds that these figures and sites of authority act as the engine for changes in state sovereignty. Ghana has served as a model of reform for the neoliberal establishment, making it an ideal site for Chalfin to explore why the restructuring of a state on the global periphery portends shifts that occur in all corners of the world. At once a foray into international political economy, politics, and political anthropology, "Neoliberal Frontiers" is an innovative interdisciplinary leap forward for ethnographic writing, as well as an eloquent addition to the literature on postcolonial Africa.

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This work provides an analysis of a tradition of American women's captivity narrative that ranges across three centuries, from Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson's abduction by Narragansett Indians to Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Examining more than 60 accounts by women captives, as well as novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's 18th-century classic "Rueben and Rachel" to modern mass-market romances, the author investigates paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find freedom from stereotypical roles as helpless, dependent, sexually vulnerable and xenophobic. In their condemnations of their non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny, and instead finds in them an appeal of a much different nature: as all-too-rare stories of imaginative challenges to rigid gender roles and racial ideologies. Whether the women of these stories resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or eventually choose to live among their captors, they end up with the power to be critical of both cultures. Castiglia shows that these compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent explorations of cultural divisions and differences, have significant implications for current critical investigations into the construction of gender, race and nation.

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Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world—from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism—one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the “felt” experience even something worth fighting for? In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before. As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself. This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.

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One of the great challenges now facing education reformers in the United States is how to devise a consistent and intelligent framework for instruction that will work across the nation's notoriously fragmented and politically conflicted school systems. Various programs have tried to do that, but only a few have succeeded. Improvement by Design looks at three different programs, seeking to understand why two of them - America's Choice and Success for All - worked, and why the third - Accelerated Schools Project - did not. The authors identify four critical puzzles that the successful programs were able to solve: design, implementation, improvement, and sustainability. Pinpointing the specific solutions that clearly improved instruction, they identify the key elements that all successful reform programs share. Offering urgently needed guidance for state and local school systems as they attempt to respond to future reform proposals, Improvement by Design gets America one step closer to truly successful education systems.

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Nearly the whole of America's partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. Policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions - because they are competitively driven - are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. Decades of research have shown that students at private schools score, on average, at higher levels than students do at public schools. Drawing on two large-scale, nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show, however, that this difference is more than explained by demographics-private school students largely come from more privileged backgrounds, offering greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the authors go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones, and the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion-autonomy - may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Offering facts, not ideologies, The Public School Advantage reveals that education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

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Eight of the last twelve presidents were millionaires when they took office. The figure is above fifty percent among current Supreme Court justices, all nine of whom graduated from either Harvard or Yale. Millionaires also control Congress, where a background in business or law is the norm and the average member of the House or Senate has spent less than two percent of his or her adult life in a working-class job. Why is it that most politicians in America are so much better off than the people who elect them - and does the social class divide between citizens and their representatives matter? With White-Collar Government, Nicholas Carnes answers this question with a resounding - and disturbing - yes. Legislators' socioeconomic backgrounds, he shows, have a profound impact not only on how they view the issues but also on the choices they make in office. Scant representation from among the working class almost guarantees that the policy-making process will be skewed toward outcomes that favor the upper class. It matters that the wealthiest Americans set the tax rates for the wealthy, that white-collar professionals choose the minimum wage for blue-collar workers, and that people who have always had health insurance decide whether to help those without. And while there is no one cause for this crisis of representation, Carnes shows that the problem does not stem from a lack of qualified candidates from among the working class. The solution, he argues, must involve a variety of changes, from the equalization of campaign funding to a shift in the types of candidates the parties support. If we want a government for the people, we have to start working toward a government that is truly by the people. White-Collar Government challenges long-held notions about the causes of political inequality in the United States and speaks to enduring questions about representation and political accountability

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Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope's digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely on handmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of hand-drawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim investigates hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers.

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In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility - the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time. Hegel's approach to art has been influential in a number of different contexts, but in a twist of historical irony Hegel would die just before the most radical artistic revolution in history: modernism. In After the Beautiful, Robert B. Pippin, looking at modernist paintings by artists such as Edouard Manet and Paul Cezanne through Hegel's lens, does what Hegel never had the chance to do. While Hegel could never engage modernist painting, he did have an understanding of modernity, and in it art was "a thing of the past," no longer an important vehicle of self-understanding and no longer an indispensable expression of human meaning. Pippin offers a sophisticated exploration of Hegel's position and shows that, had Hegel known how the social institutions of his day would ultimately fail to achieve his own version of genuine equality-a mutuality of recognition - he would have had to explore a different role for art in modernity. After laying this groundwork, Pippin goes on to illuminate the dimensions of Hegel's aesthetic approach via the works of Manet, drawing on art historians T. J. Clark and Michael Fried, and concludes with a look at Cezanne to explore the relationship between Hegel and the philosopher who would challenge Hegel's account of both modernity and art - Martin Heidegger. Elegantly interweaving philosophy and art history, After the Beautiful is a stunning reassessment of the modernist project and what it means in general for art to have a history. It is a testament, via Hegel, to the distinctive philosophical achievements of modernist art in the unsettled, tumultuous era we have inherited.

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State capitals are an indelible part of the American psyche, spatial representations of state power and national identity. Learning them by heart is a rite of passage in grade school, a pedagogical exercise that emphasizes the importance of committing place-names to memory. But geographers have yet to analyze state capitals in any depth. In American Capitals, Christian Montes takes us on a well-researched journey across America - from Augusta to Sacramento, Albany to Baton Rouge - shedding light along the way on the historical circumstances that led to their appointment, their success or failure, and their evolution over time. While all state capitals have a number of characteristics in common - as symbols of the state, as embodiments of political power and decision making, as public spaces with private interests - Montes does not interpret them through a single lens, in large part because of the differences in their spatial and historical evolutionary patterns. Some have remained small, while others have evolved into bustling metropolises, and Montes explores the dynamics of change and growth. All but eleven state capitals were established in the nineteenth century, thirty-five before 1861, but, rather astonishingly, only eight of the fifty states have maintained their original capitals. Despite their revered status as the most monumental and historical cities in America, capitals come from surprisingly humble beginnings, often plagued by instability, conflict, hostility, and corruption. Montes reminds us of the period in which they came about, "an era of pioneer and idealized territorial vision," coupled with a still-evolving American citizenry and democracy.

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Communism, once heralded as the "radiant future" of all humanity, has now become part of Eastern Europe's past. What does the record say about the legacy of communism as an organizational system? Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukacs consider this question from the standpoint of the Hungarian working class. Between 1983 and 1990 the authors carried out intensive studies in two core Hungarian industries, machine building and steel production, to produce the first extended participant-observation study of work and politics in state socialism. "A fascinating and engagingly written eyewitness report on proletarian life in the waning years of goulash communism. . . . A richly rewarding book, one that should interest political scientists in a variety of subfields, from area specialists and comparativists to political economists, as well as those interested in Marxist and post-Marxist theory."—Elizabeth Kiss, American Political Science Review"A very rich book. . . . It does not merely offer another theory of transition, but also presents a clear interpretive scheme, combined with sociological theory and vivid ethnographic description."—Ireneusz Bialecki, Contemporary Sociology"Its informed skepticism of post-Communist liberal euphoria, its concern for workers, and its fine ethnographic details make this work valuable."—"àkos Róna-Tas, American Journal of Sociology

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Michelangelo studied and wrote poetry throughout his life, and his finest literary efforts are allied with the masterwoks of his visual art, and this translation captures the pathos, complexity, and ardor of both Michelangelo's language and his poetic temperament. The text gives a glimpse into one of the most fascinating minds in the history of art, as Michelangelo laboured in the Sistine Chapel he composed a series of passionate love sonnets and while struggling, near the end of his life, to complete his final "Pieta" he worked at religious poems anguished in their fervour.

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Originally published in 1949 and appearing now for the first time in a paperbound edition, Buck's Dictionary remains an indispensable tool for diachronic analysis of the Indo-European languages. Arranged according to the meaning of words, the work contains more than 1,000 groupings of synonyms from the principal Indo-European languages. Buck first tabulates the words describing a particular concept and then discusses their etymological and semantic history, tracing changes in meaning of the root words as well as presenting cases indicating which of the older forms have been replaced by expressions of colloquial or foreign origin.

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"No one interested in the history of optics, the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physics, or the general phenomenon of theory change in science can afford to ignore Jed Buchwald's well-structured, highly detailed, and scrupulously researched book. . . . Buchwald's analysis will surely constitute the essential starting point for further work on this important and hitherto relatively neglected episode of theory change."—John Worrall, Isis

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Outsider Scientists describes the transformative role played by "outsiders" in the growth of the modern life sciences. Biology, which occupies a special place between the exact and human sciences, has historically attracted many thinkers whose primary training was in other fields: mathematics, physics, chemistry, linguistics, philosophy, history, anthropology, engineering, and even literature. These outsiders brought with them ideas and tools that were foreign to biology, but which, when applied to biological problems, helped to bring about dramatic, and often surprising, breakthroughs. This volume brings together eighteen thought-provoking biographical essays of some of the most remarkable outsiders of the modern era, each written by an authority in the respective field. From Noam Chomsky using linguistics to answer questions about brain architecture, to Erwin Schrodinger contemplating DNA as a physicist would, to Drew Endy tinkering with Biobricks to create new forms of synthetic life, the outsiders featured here make clear just how much there is to gain from disrespecting conventional boundaries. Innovation, it turns out, often relies on importing new ideas from other fields. Without its outsiders, modern biology would hardly be recognizable.

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In May 1965 Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared that 'the Viet Cong has committed the most unbelievable acts of terrorism the world has ever known.' And throughout the long conflict in Vietnam, Americans similarly demonized the enemy fighters as reds, gooks, and fanatical killers. Offering a radically different view of these supposedly savage soldiers, "Mekong Diaries" presents never-before-published drawings, poems, letters, and oral histories by ten of the most celebrated Viet Cong war artists.These guerrilla artists - some military officers and some civilians - lived clandestinely with the fighters, moving camp alongside them, going on reconnaissance missions, and carrying their sketchbooks, inks, and watercolors into combat. Trained by professors from the Hanoi Institute of Fine Arts who journeyed down the perilous Ho Chi Minh Trail to ensure a pictorial history of the war, they recorded battles and events from Operation Junction City to Khe Sanh to the Tet Offensive. They also sketched as the spirit moved them, rendering breathtaking landscapes, hut and bunker interiors, activities at base camps, troops on the move, portraits for the families of fallen soldiers, and the unimaginable devastation that the conflict left in its wake.Their collective record - which Sherry Buchanan skillfully compiles here - is an extraordinary historical and artistic document of people at war. As such, it serves as a powerful response to the self-centeredness of American accounts of Vietnam, filling a profound gap in our national memory by taking us into the misunderstood worlds of those whom we once counted among our worst enemies.

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For too long, argues Richard Harvey Brown, social scientists have felt forced to choose between imitating science's empirical methodology and impersonating a romantic notion of art, the methods of which are seen as primarily a matter of intuition, interpretation, and opinion. Developing the idea of a "cognitive aesthetic," Brown shows how both science and art—as well as the human studies that stand between them—depend on metaphoric thinking as their "logic of discovery" and may be assessed in terms of such aesthetic criteria of adequacy as economy, elegance, originality, scope, congruence, and form. By recognizing this "aesthetic" common ground between science and art, Brown demonstrates that a fusion can be achieved within the human sciences of these two principal ideals of knowledge—the scientific or positivist one and the artistic or intuitive one. A path, then, is opened for creating a knowledge of ourselves and society which is at once objective and subjective, at once valid scientifically and significantly humane.

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Decades after his death, Albert Camus (1913-60) is still regarded as one of the most influential and fascinating intellectuals of the twentieth century. This biography by Stephen Eric Bronner explores the connections between his literary work, his philosophical writings, and his politics. Camus illuminates his impoverished childhood, his existential concerns, his activities in the antifascist resistance, and the controversies in which he was engaged. Beautifully written and incisively argued, this study offers new insights and highlights the contemporary relevance of an extraordinary man.

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In 1899 an American could open a newspaper and find outrageous images, such as an American soldier being injected with leprosy by Filipino insurgents. These kinds of hyperbolic accounts, David Brody argues in this illuminating book, were just one element of the visual and material culture that played an integral role in debates about empire in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. "Visualizing American Empire" explores the ways visual imagery and design shaped the political and cultural landscape. Drawing on a myriad of sources - including photographs, tattoos, the decorative arts, the popular press, maps, parades, and material from world's fairs and urban planners - Brody offers a distinctive perspective on American imperialism. Exploring the period leading up to the Spanish-American War, as well as beyond it, Brody argues that the way Americans visualized the Orient greatly influenced the fantasies of colonial domestication that would play out in the Philippines. Throughout, Brody insightfully examines visual culture's integral role in the machinery that runs the colonial engine. The result is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the United States, art, design, or empire.

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In this book, Reuven Brenner argues that people bet on new ideas and are more willing to take risks when they have been outdone by their fellows on local, national, or international scales. Such bets mean that people deviate from the beaten path and either gamble, commit crimes, or come up with new ideas in art, business, or politics, and ideas concerning war and peace in particular. By using evidence on gambling, crime, and creativity now and during the Industrial Revolution, by examining innovations in English and French inheritance laws and the emergence of welfare legislation, and by looking at what has happened before and after wars, Brenner reaches the conclusion that hope and fear, envy and vanity, sentiments provoked when being leapfrogged, make humans race.

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In this revised and enlarged edition of his classic work, Robert H. Bremner provides a social history of American philanthropy from colonial times to the present, showing the ways in which Americans have sought to do good in such fields as religion, education, humanitarian reform, social service, war relief, and foreign aid. Three new chapters have been added that concisely cover the course of philanthropy and voluntarism in the United States over the past twenty-five years, a period in which total giving by individuals, foundations, and corporations has more than doubled in real terms and in which major revisions of tax laws have changed patterns of giving. This new edition also includes an updated chronology of important dates, and a completely revised bibliographic essay to guide readers on literature in the field. "[This] book, as Bremner points out, is not encyclopedic. It is what he intended it to be, a pleasant narrative, seasoned with humorous comments, briefly but interestingly treating its principal persons and subjects. It should serve teacher and student as a springboard for further study of individuals, institutions and movements."—Karl De Schweinitz, American Historical Review "[American Philanthropy] is the starting point for both casual readers and academic scholars. . . . a readable book, important beyond its diminutive size."—Richard Magat, Foundation News

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Today 4.7 million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months. In France more than ten percent of the working population is without work. In Israel it's above seven percent. And in Greece and Spain, that number approaches thirty percent. Across the developed world, the experience of unemployment has become frighteningly common - and so are the seemingly endless tactics that job seekers employ in their quest for new work. Job-Search Games delves beneath these staggering numbers to explore the world of job searching and unemployment across class and nation. Through in-depth interviews and observations at job-search support organizations, Ofer Sharone reveals how different labor-market institutions give rise to job-search games like Israel's resume-based "spec games" - which are focused on presenting one's skills to fit the job-and the "chemistry games" more common in the United States in which job seekers concentrate on presenting the person behind the resume. By closely examining the specific day-to-day activities and strategies of searching for a job, Sharone develops a theory of the mechanisms that connect objective social structures and subjective experiences in this challenging environment - and how these different structures can lead to very different experiences of unemployment.

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In Realizing Educational Rights, Anne Newman examines two educational rights questions that arise at the intersection of political theory, educational policy, and law: What is the place of a right to education in a participatory democracy, and how can we realize this right in the United States? Tracking these questions across both philosophical and pragmatic terrain, she addresses urgent moral and political questions, offering a rare, double-pronged look at educational justice in a democratic society. Newman argues that an adequate K-12 education is the right of all citizens, as a matter of equality, and emphasizes that this right must be shielded from the sway of partisan and majoritarian policy making far more than it currently is. She then examines how educational rights are realized in our current democratic structure, offering two case studies of leading types of rights-based activism: school finance litigation on the state level and the mobilization of citizens through community-based organizations. Bringing these case studies together with rich philosophical analysis, Realizing Educational Rights advances understanding of the relationships among moral and legal rights, education reform, and democratic politics.

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The University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (nine volumes) makes available to students and teachers a unique selection of primary documents, many in new translations. These readings, prepared for the highly praised Western civilization sequence at the University of Chicago, were chosen by an outstanding group of scholars whose experience teaching that course spans almost four decades. Each volume includes rarely anthologized selections as well as standard, more familiar texts; a bibliography of recommended parallel readings; and introductions providing background for the selections. Beginning with Periclean Athens and concluding with twentieth-century Europe, these source materials enable teachers and students to explore a variety of critical approaches to important events and themes in Western history. Individual volumes provide essential background reading for courses covering specific eras and periods. The complete nine-volume series is ideal for general courses in history and Western civilization sequences.

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Peter J. Bowler seeks to recover some of this lost history in this work, giving an account of evolutionary morphology and its relationships with paleontology and biogeography. He tracks major scientific debates over the origins of the main types of living animals and of extinct forms such as the dinosaurs. Charting the role of Darwin's ideas and the degree of their influence, the author seeks to show how these interactions constituted an interdisciplinary programme in evolutionary biology with a focus on reconstructing the past rather than on the mechanisms of change. Also examined is the rhetoric of "social Darwinism", Bowler arguing that it may have been derived not directly from the theory of natural selection but from the application of Darwinian principles to the rise and fall of different animal groups over time.

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The ultimate symbol of feudal barbarism has been the "droit de cuissage" or right of a feudal Lord to sleep with the bride of a vassal on her wedding night. This text demonstrates that it is a myth, under contextual examination nearly all the evidence for this custom melts away, yet belief in it has survived for seven hundred years. The text shows how each era turned the mythical custom to its own ends, in the late Middle Ages monarchists raised the custom to rally public opinion against local lords, and partisans of the French Revolution pointed to it as proof of the corruption of the Ancien Regime.

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David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson are two of America's preeminent film scholars. You would be hard pressed to find a serious student of the cinema who hasn't spent at least a few hours huddled with their seminal introduction to the field-Film Art, now in its ninth edition-or a cable television junkie unaware that the Independent Film Channel sagely christened them the 'Critics of the Naughts.' Since launching their blog, Observations on Film Art, in 2006, the two have added web virtuosos to their growing list of accolades, creating unconventional long-form pieces engaged with film artistry that have helped to redefine cinematic storytelling for a new age and audience. "Minding Movies" presents a selection from over three hundred essays on genre movies, art films, animation, and the business of Hollywood that have graced Bordwell and Thompson's blog. Informal pieces, conversational in tone but grounded in three decades of authoritative research, the essays gathered here range from in-depth analyses of individual films such as "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Inglourious Basterds" to adjustments of Hollywood media claims and forays into cinematic humor. For Bordwell and Thompson, the most fruitful place to begin is how movies are made, how they work, and how they work on us. Written for film lovers, these essays-on topics ranging from Borat to blockbusters and back again-will delight current fans and gain new enthusiasts. Serious but not solemn, vibrantly informative without condescension, and above all illuminating reading, Minding Movies offers ideas sure to set film lovers thinking-and keep them returning to the silver screen.

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For more than a decade, the United States has been fighting wars so far from the public eye as to risk being forgotten, the struggles and sacrifices of its volunteer soldiers almost ignored. Photographer and writer Ashley Gilbertson has been working to prevent that. His dramatic photographs of the Iraq war for the New York Times and his book Whiskey Tango Foxtrot took readers into the mayhem of Baghdad, Ramadi, Samarra, and Fallujah. But with Bedrooms of the Fallen, Gilbertson reminds us that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have also reached deep into homes far from the noise of battle, down quiet streets and country roads-the homes of family and friends who bear their grief out of view. The book's wide-format black-and-white images depict the bedrooms of forty fallen soldiers-the equivalent of a single platoon-from the United States, Canada, and several European nations. Left intact by families of the deceased, the bedrooms are a heartbreaking reminder of lives cut short: we see high school diplomas and pictures from prom, sports medals and souvenirs, and markers of the idealism that carried them to war, like images of the Twin Towers and Osama Bin Laden. A moving essay by Gilbertson describes his encounters with the families who preserve these private memorials to their loved ones and shares what he has learned from them about war and loss. Bedrooms of the Fallen is a masterpiece of documentary photography and an unforgettable reckoning with the human cost of war.

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The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so he appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would help inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster's famous "Paradise Gardens", his journey - of which "The Colorful Apocalypse" is a masterly chronicle - provides an unparalleled look into the lives and visionary works of some of Finster's contemporaries: the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and oeuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy. With his prodigious gift for conversation and quietly observant storytelling, Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation; Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now lives as a recluse in rural Wisconsin and paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter was brutally murdered. These artists' works are as wildly varied as their life stories, but without sensationalizing or patronizing them, Bottoms - one of today's finest young writers - gets at the heart of what they have in common: the struggle to make sense, through art, of their difficult personal histories. In doing so, he weaves a true narrative as powerful as the art of its subjects, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.

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Why would anyone spend free hours and weekends on a demanding practice that promises no payoff in money, fame, or power? Is it true that anything worth doing is worth doing only if you can get credit for doing it really well? Why do amateurs do what they do? Wayne Booth found himself enticed by these questions after taking up the cello at age 31 and then experiencing decades not just of unforeseen struggle but of comic and humiliating disasters - followed by hours of astonishing bliss playing chamber music. This book tells the story not only of this intimate struggle between man and cello but also of the larger struggle between a society obsessed with success and payoff and individuals who choose challenging hobbies that yield no payoff except the love of it. This fundamental opposition leads Booth into diverse meditations on how amateuring relates to all other loves and pleasures. In his celebration of how the amateur's labouring can blossom, he thus joins a long line of thinkers who have puzzled over the meanings of "fun", "work" and "love."

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Wayne Booth has selected, and has been inspired by, the works by some of our greatest writers on the art of growing older. In this widely praised anthology he shows that the very making of art is in itself a victory over time. Culled chiefly from great literary works, this unusual compendium of prose and poetry . . . highlights the physical and emotional aspects of aging. . . . The thoughtful commentary with which Booth connects the selections reminds readers that physical decay and fear of death are conditions common to us all. . . . Provocative."—Publishers Weekly "His blending of literature, humor, and crotchetiness will capture the interest of readers of all ages."—Booklist"Funny . . . profound. . . . It is hard to resist the closing chapters, which celebrate the freedom from constraint and ambition, the permission to be crotchety, the joy of memory and perspective that come with age."—William March, Tampa Tribune "Booth puts a new spin on the worries many of us have about what's catching up with us. . . . Booth's book . . . [is] for both the younger readers and those of us who are nervously counting birthdays."—Sacramento Bee

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