Search results for ""university of chicago press""

In this entertaining collection of essays, Wayne Booth looks for the much-maligned “middle ground” for reason—a rhetoric that can unite truths of the heart with truths of the head and allow us all to discover shared convictions in mutual inquiry. First delivered as lectures in the 1960s, when Booth was a professor at Earlham College and the University of Chicago, Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me still resounds with anyone struggling for consensus in a world of us versus them. “Professor Booth’s earnestness is graced by wit, irony, and generous humor.”—Louis Coxe, New Republic

Read more less

How to Make It as a Woman outlines the history of prosopography or group biography, focusing on the all-female collections that took hold in nineteenth-century Britain and America. The queens, nurses, writers, reformers, adventurers, even assassins in these collective female biographies served as models to guide the moral development of young women. But often these famous historical women presented untrustworthy examples.Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, Alison Booth traces the long tradition of this genre, investigating the varied types and stories most often grouped together in illustrated books designed for entertainment and instruction. She claims that these group biographies have been instrumental in constructing modern subjectivities as well as relations among classes, races, and nations.From Joan of Arc to Virginia Woolf, Booth examines a host of models of womanhood—both bad and good. Incorporating a bibliography that includes more than 900 all-female collections published in English between 1830 and 1940, Booth uses collective biographies to decode the varied advice on how to make it as a woman.

Read more less

This volume begins with Roman myths and traces their influence in early Christian and later European literature. Ninety-five entries by leading scholars cover subjects such as sacrificial cults and rites in pre-Roman Italy, Roman religion and its origins, the mythologies of paganism, the survival of the ancient gods in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, gypsy myths and rituals, romanticism and myth in Blake, Nerval, and Balzac, and myth in twentieth-century English literature. Mythologies offers illuminating examples of the workings of myth in the structure of societies past and present--how we create, use, and are guided by systems of myth to answer fundamental questions about ourselves and our world. Many of the sections in Mythologies, originally published as a two-volume cloth set, will soon be available in four paperback volumes (two are announced here; two more are scheduled for 1993). These volumes will reproduce the articles, introductory essays, and illustrations as they appeared in the full Mythologies set.

Read more less

In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, "AIDS is South Africa's new apartheid." In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu's assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg's squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.

Read more less

In A Social History of Modern Art, a sweeping multivolume social history of Western art from the French Revolution to World War I, Albert Boime moves beyond the concern with style and form that has traditionally characterized the study of art history and, in the tradition of Arnold Hauser, examines art in a broad historical context. Into his wide-ranging cultural inquiry Boime incorporates not only frequently studied mainstream artists and sculptors but also neglected and lesser known artists and unattributed popular imagery. He examines popular as well as official culture, the family as well as the state, and the conditions of the poor as well as of the affluent that affected cultural practice. This inaugural volume explores the artistic repercussions of the major political and economic events of the latter half of the eighteenth century: the Seven Years' War, the French Revolution, and the English industrial revolution. Boime examines the prerevolutionary popularity of the rococo style and the emergence of the cult of antiquity that followed the Seven Years' War. He shows how the continual experiments of Jacques-Louis David and others with neoclassical symbols and themes in the latter part of the century actively contributed to the transformation of French and English politics. Boime's analyses reveal the complex relationship of art with a wide range of contemporary attitudes and conditions—technological innovation, social and political tensions, commercial expansion, and the growth of capitalism. "Provocative and endlessly revealing."—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

Read more less

from Bagatelles Bagatelles, mere gestures in dry air, each pluck a dot, strokes marked on silence reaching into the dark. Beauty is strict, it passes: an echo, a wedge of harmony, sudden, broken - Who goes there? "An Algebra" is an interwoven collection of eight sequences and sixteen individual poems, where images and phrases recur in new contexts, connecting and suspending thoughts, emotions, and insights. By turns, the poems leap from the public realm of urban decay and outsourcing to the intimacies of family life, from a street mime to a haunting dream, from elegy to lyric evocation. Wholeness and brokenness intertwine in the book; glimpsed patterns and startling disjunctions drive its explorations. "An Algebra" is a work of changing equivalents, a search for balance in a world of transformation and loss. It is a brilliantly constructed, moving book by a poet who has achieved a new level of imaginative expression and skill.

Read more less

Earth I didn't come here to make speeches. I didn't come here to make trouble. I didn't come here to be somebody's mother. I didn't come here to make friends. I didn't come here to teach. I didn't come here to drag the space heater from the house in summer with an extension cord out to the orchard because the peach trees we planted in a climate that couldn't take them didn't thrive, couldn't sweeten their fruit in a place like this. The death of a mother alters forever a family's story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. The Accounts narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in the wake of that loss. The title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth - a physical account, a psychological account, and a spiritual account. It is embedded in a long narrative sequence that tries to state plainly the facts of the last days of the mother's life, in a room that formerly housed a television, next to a California backyard. The visual focus of that sequence, a robin's nest, poised above the family home, sings in a kind of lament, giving its own version of ways we can see the transformation of the dying into the dead. In other poems, called "Arguments," two voices exchange uncertain truths about subjects as high as heaven and as low as crime. Grief is a problem that cannot be solved by thinking, but that doesn't stop the mind, which relentlessly carries on, trying in vain to settle its accounts. The death of a well-loved person creates a debt that can never be repaid. It reminds the living of our own psychological debts to each other, and to the dead. In this sense, the death of this particular mother and the transformation of this particular family are evocative of a greater struggle against any changing reality, and the loss of all beautiful and passing forms of order.

Read more less

Why do aircraft fly? How do their wings support them? In the early years of aviation, there was an intense dispute between British and German experts over the question of why and how an aircraft wing provides lift. The British, under the leadership of the great Cambridge mathematical physicist Lord Rayleigh, produced highly elaborate investigations of the nature of discontinuous flow, while the Germans, following Ludwig Prandtl in Gottingen, relied on the tradition called "technical mechanics" to explain the flow of air around a wing. Much of the basis of modern aerodynamics emerged from this remarkable episode, yet it has never been subject to a detailed historical and sociological analysis. In "The Enigma of the Aerofoil", David Bloor probes a neglected aspect of this important period in the history of aviation. Bloor draws upon papers by the participants - their restricted technical reports, meeting minutes, and personal correspondence, much of which has never before been published - and reveals the impact that the divergent mathematical traditions of Cambridge and Gottingen had on this great debate. Bloor also addresses why the British, even after discovering the failings of their own theory, remained resistant to the German circulation theory for more than a decade. The result is essential reading for anyone studying the history, philosophy, or sociology of science or technology - and for all those intrigued by flight.

Read more less

Embarking upon research as a graduate student or postdoc can be exciting and enriching - the start of a rewarding career. But the world of scientific research is also a competitive one, with grants and good jobs increasingly hard to find. "The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science" is intended to help scientists not just cope with but excel at this critical phase in their careers.Victor A. Bloomfield and Esam E. El-Fakahany, both well-known scientists with extensive experience as teachers, mentors, and adminstrators, have combined their knowledge to create a guidebook that addresses all of the challenges that today's scientists-in-training face. They begin by considering the early stages of a career in science: deciding whether or not to pursue a PhD, choosing advisors and mentors, and learning how to teach effectively. Bloomfield and El-Fakahany then explore the skills essential to conducting and presenting research. "The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science" offers detailed advice on how to pursue research ethically, manage time, and communicate effectively, especially at academic conferences and with students and peers. Bloomfield and El-Fakahany write in accessible, straightforward language and include a synopsis of key points at the end of each chapter, enabling readers to dip into relevant sections with ease.From students prepping for the GRE to postdocs developing professional networks to managers of corporate labs, scientists at every level will find "The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science" an unparalleled resource.The toolkit includes advice on: choosing a graduate program; speaking effectively; defending your dissertation; making the most of scientific meetings; writing fellowship and grant proposals; landing a job; pursuing professional contacts; and, choosing an alternative career.

Read more less

In tracing the history of Darwin's accomplishment and the trajectory of evolutionary theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most scholars agree that Darwin introduced blind mechanism into biology, thus banishing moral values from the understanding of nature. According to the standard interpretation, the principle of survival of the fittest has rendered human behavior, including moral behavior, ultimately selfish. Few doubt that Darwinian theory, especially as construed by the master's German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, inspired Hitler and led to Nazi atrocities. In this collection of essays, Robert J. Richards argues that this orthodox view is wrongheaded. A close historical examination reveals that Darwin, in more traditional fashion, constructed nature with a moral spine and provided it with a goal: man as a moral creature. The book takes up many topics - including the character of Darwin's chief principles of natural selection and divergence, his dispute with Alfred Russel Wallace over man's big brain, the role of language in human development, his relationship to Herbert Spencer, how much his views had in common with Haeckel's, and the general problem of progress in evolution. Moreover, Richards takes a forceful stand on the timely issue of whether Darwin is to blame for Hitler's atrocities. Was Hitler a Darwinian? is intellectual history at its boldest.

Read more less

The discovery of the New World raised many questions for early modern scientists, and imperial expansion necessitated changes in the way scientific knowledge was gathered. Spanish cosmographers in particular were charged with turning their observations of the New World into a body of knowledge that could be used for governing the largest empire the world had ever known. As Maria M. Portuondo shows, this cosmographic knowledge had considerable strategic, defensive, and monetary value that royal scientists were charged with safeguarding from foreign and internal enemies. Cosmography was thus a secret science, but despite the limited dissemination of this body of knowledge, royal cosmographers applied alternative epistemologies and new methodologies that changed the discipline, and, in the process, how Europeans understood the natural world.

Read more less

Sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and scenographer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the last of the great universal artistic geniuses of early modern Italy, placed by both contemporaries and posterity in the same exalted company as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. And his artistic vision remains palpably present today, through the countless statues, fountains, and buildings that transformed Rome into the baroque theater that continues to enthrall tourists today. It is perhaps not surprising that this artist who defined the baroque should have a personal life that itself was, well, baroque. As Franco Mormando's dazzling biography reveals, Bernini was a man driven by many passions, possessed of an explosive temper and a hearty sex drive, and he lived a life as dramatic as any of his creations. Drawing on archival sources, letters, diaries, and - with a suitable skepticism - a hagiographic account written by Bernini's son (who portrays his father as a paragon of virtue and piety), Mormando leads us through Bernini's many feuds and love affairs, scandals and sins. He sets Bernini's raucous life against a vivid backdrop of baroque Rome, bustling and wealthy, and peopled by churchmen and bureaucrats, popes and politicians, schemes and secrets. The result is a seductively readable biography, stuffed with stories and teeming with life - as wild and unforgettable as Bernini's art. No one who has been bewitched by the baroque should miss it.

Read more less

This collection of essays and articles provides a detailed analysis of both the music and the cultural significance of children's songs among the Venda people of the northern Transvaal, South Africa. Among the various topics covered is the role of melody in generating rhythm, something that distinguishes this form of music from that of Venda adults as well as from other genres of African music in general. John Blacking (1928-1990) also wrote "How Musical is Man" and "The Anthropology of the Body".

Read more less

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler's Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories-an Austro-Modernism that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus's drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebooks and Paul Celan's lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist lit

Read more less

From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees mid-trunk, and briefly but dramatically reversing the flow of the continent's mightiest river. For decades, people puzzled over the causes of the quakes, but by the time the nation began to recover from the Civil War, the New Madrid earthquakes had essentially been forgotten. In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, Conevery Bolton Valencius remembers this major environmental disaster, demonstrating how events that have been long forgotten, even denied and ridiculed as tall tales, were in fact enormously important at the time of their occurrence, and continue to affect us today. Valencius weaves together scientific and historical evidence to demonstrate the vast role the New Madrid earthquakes played in the United States in the early nineteenth century, shaping the settlement patterns of early western Cherokees and other Indians, heightening the credibility of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa for their Indian League in the War of 1812, giving force to frontier religious revival, and spreading scientific inquiry. Moving into the present, Valencius explores the intertwined reasons - environmental, scientific, social, and economic - why something as consequential as a major earthquake can be lost from public knowledge, offering a cautionary tale in a world struggling to respond to global climate change amid widespread willful denial. Engagingly written and ambitiously researched - both in the scientific literature and the writings of the time - The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes will be an important resource in environmental history, geology, and seismology, as well as history of science and medicine and early American and Native American history.

Read more less

Ecologists can spend a lifetime researching a small patch of the earth, studying the interactions between organisms and the environment, and exploring the roles those interactions play in determining distribution, abundance, and evolutionary change. With so few ecologists and so many systems to study, generalizations are essential. But how do you extrapolate knowledge about a well-studied area and apply it elsewhere? Through a range of original essays written by eminent ecologists and naturalists, "The Ecology of Place" explores how place-focused research yields exportable general knowledge as well as practical local knowledge, and how society can facilitate ecological understanding by investing in field sites, place-centered databases, interdisciplinary collaborations, and field-oriented education programs that emphasize natural history. This unique patchwork of case-study narratives, philosophical musings, and historical analyses is tied together with commentaries from editors Ian Billick and Mary V. Price that develop and synthesize common threads. The result is a unique volume rich with all-too-rare insights into how science is actually done, as told by scientists themselves.

Read more less

"It is the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority," wrote Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers. The balance of power between Congress and the president has been a powerful thread throughout American political thought since the time of the Founding Fathers. And yet, for all that has been written on the topic, we still lack a solid empirical or theoretical justification for Hamilton's proposition. For the first time, William G. Howell, Saul P. Jackman, and Jon C. Rogowski systematically analyze the question. Congress, they show, is more likely to defer to the president's policy preferences when political debates center on national rather than local considerations. Thus, World War II and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq significantly augmented presidential power, allowing the president to enact foreign and domestic policies that would have been unattainable in times of peace. But, contrary to popular belief, there are also times when war has little effect on a president's influence in Congress. The Vietnam and Gulf Wars, for instance, did not nationalize our politics nearly so much, and presidential influence expanded only moderately. Built on groundbreaking research, The Wartime President offers one of the most significant works ever written on the wartime powers presidents wield at home.

Read more less

Examining the complex relationships between the political, popular, sexual, and textual interests of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, Lauren Berlant argues that Hawthorne mounted a sophisticated challenge to America's collective fantasy of national unity. She shows how Hawthorne's idea of citizenship emerged from an attempt to adjudicate among the official and the popular, the national and the local, the collective and the individual, utopia and history. At the core of Berlant's work is a three-part study of The Scarlet Letter, analyzing the modes and effects of national identity that characterize the narrator's representation of Puritan culture and his construction of the novel's political present tense. This analysis emerges from an introductory chapter on American citizenship in the 1850s and a following chapter on national fantasy, ranging from Hawthorne's early work "Alice Doane's Appeal" to the Statue of Liberty. In her conclusion, Berlant suggests that Hawthorne views everyday life and local political identities as alternate routes to the revitalization of the political and utopian promises of modern national life.

Read more less

Confronting a topic that has sparked considerable debate in recent years: how do musicians and music scholars "discipline" music in their efforts to confer order and meaning on it?, this collection of essays addresses this issue by formulating questions about music's canons - rules that measure and order, negotiate cultural constraints, reconstruct the past, and shape the future. Written by scholars representing the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, many of the essays seek to push at the very boundaries of these traditional divisions within the study of music.

Read more less

In this timely reevaluation of an infamous Supreme Court decision, David E. Bernstein provides a compelling survey of the history and background of Lochner v. New York. This 1905 decision invalidated state laws limiting work hours and became the leading case contending that novel economic regulations were unconstitutional. Sure to be controversial, "Rehabilitating Lochner" argues that the decision was well grounded in precedent - and that modern constitutional jurisprudence owes at least as much to the limited-government ideas of Lochner proponents as to the more expansive vision of its Progressive opponents. Tracing the influence of this decision through subsequent battles over segregation laws, sex discrimination, civil liberties, and more, "Rehabilitating Lochner" argues not only that the court acted reasonably in Lochner, but that Lochner and like-minded cases have been widely misunderstood and unfairly maligned ever since.

Read more less

A sobering look at the intimate relationship between political power and the news media, "When the Press Fails" argues that the dependence of reporters on official sources disastrously thwarts coverage of dissenting voices from outside the Beltway.The result is both an indictment of official spin and an urgent call to action that questions why the mainstream press failed to challenge the Bush administration's arguments for an invasion of Iraq or to illuminate administration policies underlying the Abu Ghraib controversy. Drawing on revealing interviews with Washington insiders and analysis of content from major news outlets, the authors illustrate the media's unilateral surrender to White House spin whenever oppositional voices elsewhere in government fall silent. Contrasting these grave failures with the refreshingly critical reporting on Hurricane Katrina - a rare event that caught officials off guard, enabling journalists to enter a nospin zone - "When the Press Fails" concludes by proposing new practices to reduce reporters' dependence on power.

Read more less

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In "Occupy", W. J. T. Mitchel, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors' lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. "You break through the screen like "Alice in Wonderland"," Taussig writes in the opening essay, "and now you can't leave or do without it." Following Taussig's artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter - by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics - Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as revolutionary monument. "Occupy" stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011's revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment - an occupation itself. Each Trios book addresses a pressing theme in critical theory, philosophy, or cultural studies through three extended essays written in close collaboration by leading scholars.

Read more less

Hope to conceive a boy? Tie a tourniquet around your husband's left testicle. Pregnant and fear a weak or malformed baby? Frequent hearty laughter should reduce the risk. And if you're a teenager of good repute, avoid dancing at all costs and stay away from wine, cosmetics, and flashy dress. What may seem quirky to today's readers certainly wasn't to its original audience - Renaissance Italians. They read advice manuals prodigiously, seeking guidance from the latest books by best-selling alchemists and snake-oil peddlers like Mrs. Isabella Cortese and Dr. Leonardo Fioravanti with an avidity not bestowed even on a Dante or a Machiavelli. This work shows 16th-century Italy from an alternative perspective: through manuals which were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians just trying to lead a better life. Rudolph M. Bell uncovers a culture much like our own in which people sought advice for everything from reining in a wayward spouse to running an efficient household. Italians who faced such timeless challenges turned to these books, which were written specifically for families of moderate means, complete with indexes, tables of contents, and marginal summaries making them easy to consult as problems arose.

Read more less

With this text, Emilio Bejel looks at Cuba's markedly homoerotic culture through writings about homosexuality, placing them in the social and political contexts that led up to the Cuban revolution. By reading against the grain of a wide variety of novels, short stories, autobiographies, newspaper articles, and films, Bejel maps out an argument about the way in which different attitudes toward power and nationalism struggle for an authoritative stance on homosexual issues. Through close readings of writers such as Jose Marti, Alfonso Hernandez-Cata, Carlos Montenegro, Jose Lezama Lima, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, and Reinaldo Arenas, the text shows that the category of homosexuality is always lurking, ghost-like, in the shadows of nationalist discourse. The book stakes out Cuba's sexual battlefield, and aims to challenge the homophobia of both Castro's revolutionaries and Cuban exiles in the States.

Read more less

Breathtaking in scope, this is the first survey of the entire ecological history of life on land—from the earliest traces of terrestrial organisms over 400 million years ago to the beginning of human agriculture. By providing myriad insights into the unique ecological information contained in the fossil record, it establishes a new and ambitious basis for the study of evolutionary paleoecology of land ecosystems. A joint undertaking of the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems Consortium at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and twenty-six additional researchers, this book begins with four chapters that lay out the theoretical background and methodology of the science of evolutionary paleoecology. Included are a comprehensive review of the taphonomy and paleoenvironmental settings of fossil deposits as well as guidelines for developing ecological characterizations of extinct organisms and the communities in which they lived. The remaining three chapters treat the history of terrestrial ecosystems through geological time, emphasizing how ecological interactions have changed, the rate and tempo of ecosystem change, the role of exogenous "forcing factors" in generating ecological change, and the effect of ecological factors on the evolution of biological diversity. The six principal authors of this volume are all associated with the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems program at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

Read more less

When former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement on the fourth of July, 1910 to fight current black heavywight champion Jack Johnson in Reno, Nevada, he boasted that he was doing it "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro". Jeffries, though, was trounced and Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, the author of this work seeks to demonstrate, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance. In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Gail Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans - Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman - she explores the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.

Read more less

Why has the large income gap between blacks and whites persisted for decades after the passage of civil rights legislation? More specifically, why do African Americans remain substantially under-represented in the highest-paying professions, such as science, engineering, information technology, and finance? A sophisticated study of racial disparity, "Opting Out" examines why some talented black undergraduates pursue lower-paying, lower-status careers despite being amply qualified for more prosperous ones. To explore these issues, Maya A. Beasley conducted in-depth interviews with black and white juniors at two of the nation's most elite universities, one public and one private. Beasley identifies a set of complex factors behind these students' career aspirations, including the anticipation of discrimination in particular fields; the racial composition of classes, student groups, and teaching staff; student values; and, the availability of opportunities to network. Ironically, Beasley also discovers, campus policies designed to enhance the academic and career potential of black students often reduce the diversity of their choices. Shedding new light on the root causes of racial inequality, "Opting Out" will be essential reading for parents, educators, students, scholars, and policy makers.

Read more less

African Studies, contrary to some accounts, is not a separate continent in the world of American higher education. Its intellectual borders touch those of economics, literature, history, philosophy and art; its history is the story of the world, both ancient and modern. This is the clear conclusion of "Africa and the Disciplines", a book that addresses the question: Why should Africa be studied in the American university? This question was put to distinguished scholars in the social sciences and humanities, prominent Africanists who are also leaders in their various disciplines. Their responses make a strong case for the importance of research on Africa to the academy. Paul Collier's essay, for example, shows how studies of African economies have clarified our understanding of the small open economies, and contributed to the theory of repressed inflation and to a number of areas in microeconomics as well. Art historian Suzanne Blier uses the terms and concepts that her discipline has applied to Africa to analyze the habits of mind and social practice of her own field. Christopher I. Miller describes the confounding and enriching impact of Africa on European and American literary theory. Political scientist Richard Sklar outlines Africa's contributions to the study of political modernization, pluralism, and rational choice. These essays, together with others from scholars in history, anthropology, philosophy, and comparative literature, attest to the influence of African research throughout the curriculum. Contributors are Paul Collier, Sally Falk Moore, Richard L. Sklar, Steven Feierman, Susan Blier, Christopher L. Miller, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, in addition to the editors.

Read more less

A familiar cultural presence for people the world over, "the whiteman" has come to personify the legacy of colonialism, the face of Western modernity, and the force of globalization. Focusing on the cultural meanings of whitemen in the Orokaiva society of Papua New Guinea, this book provides a fresh approach to understanding how race is symbolically constructed and why racial stereotypes endure in the face of counter evidence. While Papua New Guinea's resident white population has been severely reduced due to postcolonial white flight, the whiteman remains a significant racial and cultural other here - not only as an archetype of power and wealth in the modern arena, but also as a foil for people's evaluations of themselves within vernacular frames of meaning. As Ira Bashkow explains, ideas of self versus other need not always be anti-humanistic or deprecatory, but can be a creative and potentially constructive part of all cultures. A brilliant analysis of whiteness and race in a non-Western society, "The Meaning of Whitemen" turns traditional ethnography to the purpose of understanding how others see us.

Read more less

"Made to be Seen" brings together leading scholars of visual anthropology to examine the historical development of this multifaceted and growing field. Expanding the definition of visual anthropology beyond more limited notions, the contributors to "Made to be Seen" reflect on the role of the visual in all areas of life. Different essays critically examine a range of topics: art, dress and body adornment, photography, the built environment, digital forms of visual anthropology, indigenous media, the body as a cultural phenomenon, the relationship between experimental and ethnographic film, and more. The first attempt to present a comprehensive overview of the many aspects of an anthropological approach to the study of visual and pictorial culture, "Made to be Seen" will be the standard reference on the subject for years to come. Students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, visual studies, and cultural studies will greatly benefit from this pioneering look at the way the visual is inextricably threaded through most, if not all, areas of human activity.

Read more less

Bears, Bulls, Cubs, Sox, Blackhawks - there's no city like Chicago when it comes to sports. Generation after generation, Chicagoans pass down their almost religious allegiances to teams, stadiums, and players and their never-say-die attitude, along with the stories of the city's best (and worst) sports moments. And every one of those moments - every come-from-behind victory or crushing defeat - has been chronicled by Chicago's unparalleled sportswriters. In From Black Sox to Three-Peats, veteran Chicago sports columnist Ron Rapoport assembles one hundred of the best pieces from the Tribune, Sun-Times, Daily News, Defender, and other papers to tell the unforgettable story of a century of Chicago sports. From Ring Lardner to Rick Telander, Westbrook Pegler to Bob Verdi, Mike Royko to Wendell Smith, Melissa Isaacson to Brent Musburger, and on, this collection reminds us that Chicago sports fans have enjoyed a wealth of talent not just on the field, but in the press box as well. Through their stories we relive the betrayal of the Black Sox, the cocksure power of the '85 Bears, the assassin's efficiency of Jordan's Bulls, the Blackhawks' stunning reclamation of the Stanley Cup, and the Cubs' century of futility. Sports are the most ephemeral of news events: once you know the outcome, the drama is gone. But every once in a while, there are those games, those teams, those players that make it into something more-and great writers can transform those fleeting moments into lasting stories that become part of the very identity of a city. From Black Sox to Three-Peats is Chicago history at its most exciting and celebratory. No sports fan should be without it.

Read more less

Too often we think of the modern political state as a universal institution, the inevitable product of History rather than a specific creation of a very particular history. Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum here persuasively argue that the origin of the state is a social fact, arising out of the peculiar sociohistorical context of Western Europe. Drawing on historical materials and bringing sociological insights to bear on a field long abandoned to jurists and political scientists, the authors lay the foundations for a strikingly original theory of the birth and subsequent diffusion of the state. The book opens with a review of the principal evolutionary theories concerning the origin of the institution proposed by such thinkers as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Rejecting these views, the authors set forward and defend their thesis that the state was an "invention" rather than a necessary consequence of any other process. Once invented, the state was disseminated outside its Western European birthplace either through imposition or imitation. The study concludes with concrete analyses of the differences in actual state institutions in France, Prussia, Great Britain, the United States, and Switzerland.

Read more less

In this explosive book, Houston Baker takes stock of the current state of Black Studies in the university and outlines its responsibilities to the newest form of black urban expression--rap. A frank, polemical essay, Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy is an uninhibited defense of Black Studies and an extended commentary on the importance of rap. Written in the midst of the political correctness wars and in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Baker's meditation on the academy and black urban expression has generated much controversy and comment from both ends of the political spectrum.

Read more less

How a generation of women artists is transforming photography with analogue techniques. Beginning in the 1990s, a series of major artists imagined the expansion of photography, intensifying its ideas and effects while abandoning many of its former medium constraints. Simultaneous with this development in contemporary art, however, photography was moving toward total digitalization. Lateness and Longing presents the first account of a generation of artists—focused on the work of Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Sharon Lockhart, and Moyra Davey—who have collectively transformed the practice of photography, using analogue technologies in a dissident way and radicalizing signifiers of older models of feminist art. All these artists have resisted the transition to the digital in their work. Instead—in what amounts to a series of feminist polemics—they return to earlier, incomplete, or unrealized moments in photography’s history, gravitating toward the analogue basis of photographic mediums. Their work announces that photography has become—not obsolete—but “late,” opened up by the potentially critical forces of anachronism. Through a strategy of return—of refusing to let go—the work of these artists proposes an afterlife and survival of the photographic in contemporary art, a formal lateness wherein photography finds its way forward through resistance to the contemporary itself.

Read more less

Without scenery, costumes, and stage action, an opera would be little more than a concert. But in the audience, we know little (and think less) about the enormous efforts of those involved in bringing an opera to life - by the stagehands who shift scenery, the scenic artists who create beautiful backdrops, the electricians who focus the spotlights, and the stage manager who calls them and the singers to their places during the performance. The first comprehensive history of the behind-the-scenes world of opera production and staging, "From the Score to the Stage" follows the evolution of visual style and set design in continental Europe from its birth in the seventeenth century up to today. In clear, witty prose, Evan Baker covers all the major players and pieces involved in getting an opera onto the stage, from the stage director who creates the artistic concept for the production and guides the singers' interpretation of their roles to the blocking of singers and placement of scenery. He concentrates on the people - composers, librettists, designers, and technicians - as well as the theaters and events that generated developments in opera production. Additional topics include the many difficulties in performing an opera, the functions of impresarios, and the business of music publishing. Delving into the absorbing and often neglected history of stage directing, theater architecture and technology, and scenic and lighting design, Baker nimbly links these technical aspects of opera to actual performances and performers, and the social context in which they appeared. Out of these details arise illuminating discussions of individual productions that cast new light on the operas of Wagner, Verdi, and others. Packed with nearly two hundred color illustrations, "From the Score to the Stage" is a revealing, always entertaining look at what happens before the curtain goes up on opening night at the opera house.

Read more less

"Building the South Side" explores the struggle for influence that dominated the planning and development of Chicago's South Side during the Progressive Era. Robin F. Bachin examines the early days of the University of Chicago, Chicago's public parks, Comiskey Park, and the Black Belt to consider how community leaders looked to the physical design of the city to shape its culture and promote civic interaction.Bachin highlights how the creation of a local terrain of civic culture was a contested process, with the battle for cultural authority transforming urban politics and blurring the line between private and public space. In the process, universities, parks and playgrounds, and commercial entertainment districts emerged as alternative arenas of civic engagement.

Read more less

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal wrote in 1654. But then there's Walt Whitman, in 1856: "Whoever you are, come forth! Or man or woman come forth! / You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house." It is truly an ancient debate: Is it better to be active or contemplative? To do or to think? To make an impact, or to understand the world more deeply? Aristotle argued for contemplation as the highest state of human flourishing. But it was through action that his student Alexander the Great conquered the known world. Which should we aim at? Centuries later, this argument underlies a surprising number of the questions we face in contemporary life. Should students study the humanities, or train for a job? Should adults work for money or for meaning? And in tumultuous times, should any of us sit on the sidelines, pondering great books, or throw ourselves into protests and petition drives? With Action vs. Contemplation, Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule address the question in a refreshingly unexpected way: by refusing to take sides. Rather, they argue for a rethinking of the very opposition. The active and the contemplative can--and should--be vibrantly alive in each of us, fused rather than sundered. Writing in a personable, accessible style, Summit and Vermeule guide readers through the long history of this debate from Plato to Pixar, drawing compelling connections to the questions and problems of today. Rather than playing one against the other, they argue, we can discover how the two can nourish, invigorate, and give meaning to each other, as they have for the many writers, artists, and thinkers, past and present, whose examples give the book its rich, lively texture of interplay and reference. This is not a self-help book. It won't give you instructions on how to live your life. Instead, it will do something better: it will remind you of the richness of a life that embraces action and contemplation, company and solitude, living in the moment and planning for the future. Which is better? Readers of this book will discover the answer: both.

Read more less

In "Trying Biology", Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the importance of timing: the Scopes trial occurred at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across the country. He places the trial in this broad context - alongside American Protestant anti evolution sentiment - and in doing so sheds new light on the trial and the historical relationship of science and religion in America. For the first time we see how religious objections to evolution became a prevailing concern to the American textbook industry even before the Scopes trial began. Shapiro explores both the development of biology textbooks leading up to the trial and the ways in which the textbook industry created new books and presented them as "responses" to the trial. Today, the controversy continues over textbook warning labels, making Shapiro's study - particularly as it plays out in one of America's most famous trials - an original contribution to a timely discussion.

Read more less

"Economic Development makes an important contribution of the literature on economic development, especially as it incorporates ideas on a theme that informs our concern for social justice, individual and social freedom, identify, and community."—Winston E. Langley, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Read more less

The young people of the Cameroon Grassfields have been subject to a long history of violence and political marginalization. For centuries, the main victims of the slave trade, they became prime targets for forced labor campaigns under a series of colonial rulers. Today's youth remain at the bottom of the fiercely hierarchical and polarized societies of the Grassfields, and it is their response to centuries of exploitation that Nicolas Pandely Argenti takes up in this absorbing and original book. Beginning his study with a political analysis of youth in the Grassfields from the eighteenth century to the present, Argenti pays special attention to the repeated violent revolts staged by young victims of political oppression. He then combines this history with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Oku chiefdom, discovering that the specter of past violence lives on in the masked dance performances that have earned intense devotion from today's youth. Argenti contends that by evoking the imagery of past cataclysmic events, these masquerades allow young Oku men and women to address the inequities they face in their relations with elders and state authorities today.

Read more less

What is the relationship between intelligence and sex? In recent decades, studies of the controversial histories of both intelligence testing and human sexuality in the United States have been increasingly common - and hotly debated. But rarely have the intersections of these histories been examined. In "Gentlemen's Disagreement", Peter Hegarty enters this historical debate by recalling the debate between Lewis Terman - the intellect who championed the testing of intelligence - and pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and shows how intelligence and sexuality have interacted in American psychology. Through a fluent discussion of intellectually gifted onanists, unhappily married men, queer geniuses, lonely frontiersmen, religious ascetics, and the two scholars themselves, Hegarty traces the origins of Terman's complaints about Kinsey's work to show how the intelligence testing movement was much more concerned with sexuality than we might remember. And, drawing on Foucault, Hegarty reconciles these legendary figures by showing how intelligence and sexuality in early American psychology and sexology were intertwined then and remain so to this day.

Read more less

When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Art and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. Andrew Apter's The Pan-African Nation tells the full story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust. According to Apter, FESTAC expanded the horizons of blackness in Nigeria to mirror the global circuits of its economy. By showcasing masks, dances, images, and souvenirs from its many diverse ethnic groups, Nigeria forged a new national culture. In the grandeur of this oil-fed confidence, the nation subsumed all black and African cultures within its empire of cultural signs and erased its colonial legacies from collective memory. As the oil economy collapsed, however, cultural signs became unstable, contributing to rampant violence and dissimulation. The Pan-African Nation unpacks FESTAC as a historically situated mirror of production in Nigeria. More broadly, it points towards a critique of the political economy of the sign in postcolonial Africa.

Read more less

From xenophobic appropriations of Joan of Arc to Afro-futurism and cyberpunk, the "national" characters of the colonial era often seem to be dissolving into postnational and virtual subjects. In "Continental Drift," Emily Apter deftly analyzes the French colonial and postcolonial experience as a case study in the erosion of belief in national destiny and the emergence of technologically mediated citizenship. Among the many topics Apter explores are the fate of national literatures in an increasingly transnational literary climate; the volatile stakes of Albert Camus's life and reputation against the backdrop of Algerian civil strife; the use of literary and theatrical productions to "script" national character for the colonies; belly-dancing and aesthetic theory; and the impact of new media on colonial and postcolonial representation, from tourist photography to the videos of Digital Diaspora. "Continental Drift" advances debates not just in postcolonial studies, but also in gender, identity, and cultural studies; ethnography; psychoanalysis; and performance studies.

Read more less

It's not what you say, but how you say it. Solving problems with words is the essence of politics, and finding the right words for the moment can make or break a politician's career. Yet very little has been said in political science about the elusive element of tone. In "Political Tone", Roderick P. Hart, Jay P. Childers, and Colene J. Lind analyze a range of texts - from speeches and debates to advertising and print and broadcast campaign coverage - using a sophisticated computer program, Diction, that parses their content for semantic features like realism, commonality, and certainty, as well as references to religion, party, or patriotic terms. Beginning with a look at how societal forces like diversity and modernity manifest themselves as political tones in the contexts of particular leaders and events, the authors proceed to consider how individual leaders have used tone to convey their messages: How did Bill Clinton's clever dexterity help him recover from the Monica Lewinsky scandal? How did Barack Obama draw on his experience as a talented community activist to overcome his inexperience as a national leader? And how does Sarah Palin's wandering tone indicate that she trusts her listeners and is open to their ideas? By focusing not on the substance of political arguments but on how they were phrased, "Political Tone" provides powerful and unexpected insights into American politics.

Read more less

We didn't always eat the way we do today, or think and feel about eating as we now do. But we can trace the roots of our own eating culture back to the culinary world of early modern Europe, which invented cutlery, haute cuisine, the weight-loss diet, and much else besides. "Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup" tells the story of how early modern Europeans put food into words and words into food, and created an experience all their own. Named after characters in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night", this lively study draws on sources ranging from cookbooks to comic novels, and examines both the highest ideals of culinary culture and its most grotesque, ridiculous, and pathetic expressions. Robert Appelbaum paints a vivid picture of a world in which food was many things - from a symbol of prestige and sociability to a cause for religious and economic struggle - but always represented the primacy of materiality in life. Peppered with illustrations and a handful of recipes, "Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup" will appeal to anyone interested in early modern literature or the history of food.

Read more less

We think of bees as being among the busiest workers in the garden, admiring them for their productivity. But amid their buzzing, they are also great communicators—and unusual dancers. As Karl von Frisch (1886–1982) discovered during World War II, bees communicate the location of food sources to each other through complex circle and waggle dances. For centuries, beekeepers had observed these curious movements in hives, and others had speculated about the possibility of a bee language used to manage the work of the hive. But it took von Frisch to determine that the bees’ dances communicated precise information about the distance and direction of food sources. As Tania Munz shows in this exploration of von Frisch’s life and research, this important discovery came amid the tense circumstances of the Third Reich.The Dancing Bees draws on previously unexplored archival sources in order to reveal von Frisch’s full story, including how the Nazi government in 1940 determined that he was one-quarter Jewish, revoked his teaching privileges, and sought to prevent him from working altogether until circumstances intervened. In the 1940s, bee populations throughout Europe were facing the devastating effects of a plague (just as they are today), and because the bees were essential to the pollination of crops, von Frisch’s research was deemed critical to maintaining the food supply of a nation at war. The bees, as von Frisch put it years later, saved his life. Munz not only explores von Frisch’s complicated career in the Third Reich, she looks closely at the legacy of his work and the later debates about the significance of the bee language and the science of animal communication. This first in-depth biography of von Frisch paints a complex and nuanced portrait of a scientist at work under Nazi rule. The Dancing Bees will be welcomed by anyone seeking to better understand not only this chapter of the history of science but also the peculiar waggles of our garden visitors.

Read more less

No part of the United States was more resistant to the civil rights movement and its pursuit of racial equality than Mississippi. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle explores the civil rights movement in that state to consider its emergence before the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its impact long after. Did the civil rights movement have a lasting impact, and, if so, how did it bring about change? Kenneth T. Andrews is the first scholar to examine not only the history of the movement but its social and political legacy as well. His study demonstrates how during the 1970s and '80s, local movements worked to shape electoral politics, increase access to better public schools, and secure the administration of social welfare to needy African Americans.Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is also the first book of its kind to detail the activities of white supremacists in Mississippi, revealing how white repression and intimidation sparked black activism and simultaneously undermined the movement's ability to achieve far-reaching goals. Andrews shows that the federal government's role was important but reactive as federal actors responded to the sustained struggles between local movements and their opponents. He tracks the mobilization of black activists by the NAACP, the creation of Freedom Summer, efforts to galvanize black voters, the momentous desegregation of public schools and the rise of all-white private academies, and struggles over the economic development of black communities. From this complex history, Andrews shows how the civil rights movement built innovative organizations and campaigns that empowered local leadership and had a lasting legacy in Mississippi and beyond.Based on an original and creative research design that combines extensive archival research, interviews with activists, and quantitative historical data, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle provides many new insights into the civil rights struggle, and it presents a much broader theory to explain whether and how movements have enduring impacts on politics and society. What results is a work that will be invaluable to students of social movements, democratic politics, and the struggle for racial freedom in the U.S.

Read more less

Victorian Britain, with its maritime economy and strong links between government and scientific enterprises, founded an office to collect meteorological statistics in 1854 in an effort to foster a modern science of the weather. But as the office turned to prediction rather than data collection, the fragile science became a public spectacle, with its forecasts open to daily scrutiny in the newspapers. And meteorology came to assume a pivotal role in debates about the responsibility of scientists and the authority of science.Studying meteorology as a means to examine the historical identity of prediction, Katharine Anderson offers here an engrossing account of forecasting that analyzes scientific practice and ideas about evidence, the organization of science in public life, and the articulation of scientific values in Victorian culture. In Predicting the Weather, Anderson grapples with fundamental questions about the function, intelligibility, and boundaries of scientific work while exposing the public expectations that shaped the practice of science during this period.A cogent analysis of the remarkable history of weather forecasting in Victorian Britain, Predicting the Weather will be essential reading for scholars interested in the public dimensions of science.

Read more less