Search results for ""university of chicago press""

An academic career in the biological sciences typically demands well over a decade of technical training. So it's ironic that when a scholar reaches one of the most critical stages in that career - the search for a job following graduate work - he or she receives little or no formal preparation. Instead, students are thrown into the job market with only cursory guidance on how to search for and land a position. Now there's help. Carefully, clearly, and with a welcome sense of humor, "The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology" leads graduate students and postdoctoral fellows through the perils and rewards of their first job search. The authors - who collectively have mentored students and served on hiring committees for decades - have honed their advice in workshops delivered to anxious audiences at biology meetings across the country. The resulting volume covers everything from how to pack an overnight bag without wrinkling a suit to the decision-making processes of hiring committees to selecting the right job to apply for in the first place. The authors have taken care to make their advice useful to all areas of academic biology, including genetics, organismal biology, and evolutionary biology, and they give tips on how applicants can tailor their approaches to institutions ranging from major research universities to small private colleges. Written in a lively, positive style, "The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology" will be indispensable to graduate students and postdocs as they enter that domain red in tooth and claw: the job market.

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Nobel laureate and scientific luminary Enrico Fermi (1901-54) was a pioneering nuclear physicist whose contributions to the field were numerous, profound, and lasting. Best known for his involvement with the Manhattan Project and his work at Los Alamos that led to the first self-sustained nuclear reaction and, ultimately, to the production of electric power and plutonium for atomic weapons, Fermi and his work continue to color the character of the sciences at the University of Chicago. During his tenure as professor of physics at the Institute for Nuclear Studies, Fermi attracted an extraordinary scientific faculty and many talented students-ten Nobel Prizes were awarded to faculty or students under his tutelage. Fermi Remembered combines essays and newly commissioned reminiscences with private material from Fermi's research notebooks, correspondence, speech outlines, and teaching to document the profound and enduring significance of Fermi's life and labors. The volume features extensive archival material - including correspondence between Fermi and physicist Leo Szilard and a letter from Harry Truman - with new introductions that provide context for both the history of physics and the academic tradition at the University of Chicago.

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The Vaqueiros de Alzada, a cattle-herding people in the Asturian mountains of Spain, have one of the highest suicide rates in Europe—and an attitude toward death that gives this statistic unusual meaning. This World, Other Worlds considers death among the Vaqueiros as a central cultural fact which reveals local ideas about the origin and destiny of humans, the relations of humans and animals, the configuration of the universe, and the nature of society. Interested chiefly in the conceptual and meaningful aspects of death, María Cátedra focuses on the cultural resources with which the Vaqueiros confront their own mortality—how they experience death and what this reveals about the way they see this world and other worlds. Applying sensitive ethnographic insight to a rich body of oral testimony, Cátedra discloses an unsuspected symbolic universe native to the Vaqueiros. Death is seen here in close, coherent relation to pain, age, and suffering; sickness and suicide, one must understand the cultural valuation of different ways of dying and the conditions under which suicides take place. To understand what it means to be a Vaqueiro is to understand how suicide can be perceived by a people as acceptable. A groundbreaking work in European ethnography, This World, Other Worlds takes symbolic analysis to a new level. In its illumination of local conceptions of death, grace, and sainthood, the book also makes a substantial contribution to the anthropology of religion.

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The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, "I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club." Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture - civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors - to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. "Beautiful Democracy" explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, "Beautiful Democracy" ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.

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The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, "I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club." Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture - civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors - to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. "Beautiful Democracy" explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, "Beautiful Democracy" ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.

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The Open Mind chronicles the development and promulgation of a scientific vision of the rational, creative, and autonomous self, demonstrating how this self became a defining feature of Cold War culture. Jamie Cohen-Cole illustrates how from 1945 to 1965 policy makers and social critics used the idea of an open-minded human nature to advance centrist politics. They reshaped intellectual culture and instigated nationwide educational reform that promoted more open, and indeed more human, minds. The new field of cognitive science was central to this project, as it used popular support for open-mindedness to overthrow the then-dominant behaviorist view that the mind either could not be studied scientifically or did not exist. Cognitive science also underwrote the political implications of the open mind by treating it as the essential feature of human nature. While the open mind unified America in the first two decades after World War II, between 1965 and 1975 battles over the open mind fractured American culture as the ties between political centrism and the scientific account of human nature began to unravel. During the late 1960s, feminists and the New Left repurposed Cold War era psychological tools to redefine open-mindedness as a characteristic of left-wing politics. As a result, once liberal intellectuals became neoconservative, and in the early 1970s, struggles against open-mindedness gave energy and purpose to the right wing.

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Markets are artifacts of language - so Douglas R. Holmes argues in this deeply researched look at central banks and the people who run them. Working at the intersection of anthropology, linguistics, and economics, he shows how central bankers have been engaging in communicative experiments that predate the financial crisis and continue to be refined amid its unfolding turmoil - experiments that do not merely describe the economy, but actually create its distinctive features. Holmes examines the New York District Branch of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, and the Bank of England, among others, and shows how bank officials have created a new monetary regime that relies on collaboration with the public to achieve the ends of monetary policy. Central bankers, Holmes argues, have shifted the conceptual anchor of monetary affairs away from standards such as gold or fixed exchange rates and toward an evolving relationship with the public, one rooted in sentiments and expectations. Going behind closed doors to reveal the intellectual world of central banks, Economy of Words offers provocative new insights into the way our economic circumstances are conceptualized and ultimately managed.

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Fifteen years in the making, "Hyperpolitics" is an interactive dictionary offering a wholly original approach for understanding and working with the most central concepts in political science. Designed and authored by two of the discipline's most distinguished scholars, its purpose is to provide its readers with fresh critical insights about what informs these political concepts, as well as a method by which readers - and especially students - can unpack and reconstruct them on their own. rnational in scope, "Hyperpolitics" draws upon a global vocabulary in order to turn complex ideas into an innovative teaching aid. Its companion open access website has already been widely acknowledged in the fields of education and political science and will continue to serve as a formidable hub for the book's audience. Much more than a dictionary and enhanced by dynamic graphics, "Hyperpolitics" introduces an ingenious means of understanding complicated concepts that will be an invaluable tool for scholars and students alike.

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At fifteen, Victor Rios found himself a human target flat on his ass amid a hail of shotgun fire, desperate for money and a place on the street. Faced with the choice of escalating a drug turf war or eking out a living elsewhere, he turned to a teacher, who mentored him and helped him find a job at an auto shop. That job would alter the course of his whole life putting him on the road to college and eventually a PhD. Now, Rios is a rising star, hailed for his work studying the lives of African American and Latino youth. In Human Targets, Rios takes us to the streets of California, where we encounter young men who find themselves in much the same situation as fifteen-year-old Victor. We follow young gang members into schools, homes, community organizations, and detention facilities, watch them interact with police, grow up to become fathers, get jobs, get rap sheets and in some cases get killed. What is it that sets apart young people like Rios who succeed and survive from the ones who don't? Rios makes a powerful case that the traditional good kid/bad kid, street kid/decent kid dichotomy is much too simplistic, arguing instead that authorities and institutions help create these identities and that they can play an instrumental role in providing young people with the resources for shifting between roles. In Rios's account, to be a poor Latino youth is to be a human target victimized and considered an enemy by others, viewed as a threat to law enforcement and schools, and treated with stigma, disrepute, and punishment. That has to change. This is not another sensationalistic account of gang bangers. Instead, the book is a powerful look at how authority figures succeed and fail at seeing the multi-faceted identities of at-risk youths, youths who succeed and fail at demonstrating to the system that they are ready to change their lives. In our post-Ferguson era, Human Targets is essential reading.

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Public policy in the United States is the product of decisions made by more than 500,000 elected officials, the vast majority of them elected on days other than Election Day. And because far fewer voters turn out for off-cycle elections, that means the majority of officials in America are elected by a politically motivated minority of Americans. Sarah F. Anzia is the first to systemically address the effects of election timing on political outcomes, and her findings are eye-opening. The low turnout for off-cycle elections, Anzia argues, increases the influence of organized interest groups like teachers' unions and municipal workers. While such groups tend to vote at high rates regardless of when the election is held, the low turnout in off-cycle years enhances the effectiveness of their mobilization efforts and makes them a proportionately larger bloc. Throughout American history, the issue of election timing has been a contentious one. Anzia's book traces efforts by interest groups and political parties to change the timing of elections to their advantage, resulting in the electoral structures we have today. Ultimately, what might seem at first glance to be mundane matters of scheduling are better understood as tactics designed to distribute political power, determining who has an advantage in the electoral process and who will control government at the municipal, county, and state levels.

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The urgent demand for housing after World War I fueled a boom in residential construction that led to historic peaks in home ownership. Foreclosures at the time were rare, and when they did happen, lenders could quickly recoup their losses by selling into a strong market. But no mortgage system is equipped to deal with credit problems on the scale of the Great Depression. As foreclosures quintupled, it became clear that the mortgage system of the 1920s was not up to the task, and borrowers, lenders, and real estate professionals sought action at the federal level. Well Worth Saving tells the story of the disastrous housing market during the Great Depression and the extent to which an immensely popular New Deal relief program, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), was able to stem foreclosures by buying distressed mortgages from lenders and refinancing them. Drawing on historical records and modern statistical tools, Price Fishback, Jonathan Rose, and Kenneth Snowden investigate important unanswered questions to provide an unparalleled view of the mortgage loan industry throughout the 1920s and early '30s. Combining this with the stories of those involved, the book offers a clear understanding of the HOLC within the context of the housing market in which it operated, including an examination of how the incentives and behaviors at play throughout the crisis influenced the effectiveness of policy. More than eighty years after the start of the Great Depression, when politicians have called for similar programs to quell the current mortgage crisis, this accessible account of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation holds invaluable lessons for our own time.

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In "The Death of the American Trial", distinguished legal scholar Robert P. Burns makes an impassioned case for reversing the rapid decline of the trial before we lose one of our public culture's greatest achievements. As a practice that is adapted for modern times yet rooted in ancient wisdom, the trial is uniquely suited to balance the tensions - between idealism and realism, experts and citizens, contextual judgment and reliance on rules - that define American culture. Arguing that many observers make a grave mistake by taking a complacent or even positive view of the trial's demise, Burns concludes by laying out the catastrophic consequences of losing an institution that so perfectly embodies democratic governance.

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Stephen Bunker challenges the image of peasants as passive victims and argues that coffee growers in the Bugisu District of Uganda, because they own land and may choose which crops to produce, maintain an unusual degree of economic and political independence. Focusing on peasant struggles for market control over coffee exports in Bugisu from colonial times through the reign and overthrow of Idi Amin, Bunker shows that these freeholding peasants acted collectively and used the state's dependence on coffee export revenues to effectively influence and veto government programs inimical to their interests. Bunker's work vividly portrays the small victories and great trials of ordinary people struggling to control their own economic destiny while resisting the power of the world economy.

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"As he usually does, Professor Buchanan has produced an interesting and provocative piece of work. [Cost and Choice] starts off as an essay in the history of cost theory; the central ideas of the book are traced to Davenport and Knight in the United States, and to a series of distinguished writers associated at various times with the London School of Economics. The author emerges from this discussion with what can be described as the ultimate in subjectivist cost doctrines. . . . Economists should learn the lessons offered to us in this little book—and learn them well. It can save them from serious errors."—William J. Baumol, Journal of Economic Literature

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Despite George W. Bush's professed opposition to big government, federal spending has increased under his watch more quickly than it did during the Clinton administration, and demands on government have continued to grow. Why? Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs show that conservative efforts to expand markets and shrink government often have the ironic effect of expanding government's reach by creating problems that force legislators to enact new rules and regulations. Dismantling the flawed reasoning behind these attempts to cast markets and public power in opposing roles, "The Private Abuse of the Public Interest" urges citizens and policy makers to recognize that properly functioning markets presuppose the government's ability to create, sustain, and repair them over time.The authors support their pragmatic approach with evidence drawn from in-depth analyses of education, transportation, and health care policies. In each policy area, initiatives such as school choice, deregulation of airlines and other carriers, and the promotion of managed care have introduced or enlarged the role of market forces with the aim of eliminating bureaucratic inefficiency. But in each case, the authors show, reality proved to be much more complex than market models predicted. This complexity has resulted in a political cycle - strikingly consistent across policy spheres - that culminates in public interventions to sustain markets while protecting citizens from their undesirable effects. Situating these case studies in the context of more than two hundred years of debate about the role of markets in society, Brown and Jacobs call for a renewed focus on public-private partnerships that recognize and respect both sectors' vital - and fundamentally complementary - roles.

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"The merits of this work are many. A rigorous integration of phylogenetic hypotheses into studies of adaptation, adaptive radiation, and coevolution is absolutely necessary and can change dramatically our collective 'gestalt' about much in evolutionary biology. The authors advance and illustrate this thesis beautifully. The writing is often lucid, the examples are plentiful and diverse, and the juxtaposition of examples from different biological systems argues forcefully for the validity of the thesis. Many new insights are offered here, and the work is usually accessible to both the practiced phylogeneticist and the naive ecologist."—Joseph Travis, Florida State University "[Phylogeny, Ecology, and Behavior] presents its arguments forcefully and cogently, with ample . . .support. Brooks and McLennan conclude as they began, with the comment that evolution is a result, not a process, and that it is the result of an interaction of a variety of processes, environmental and historical. Evolutionary explanations must consider all these components, else they are incomplete. As Darwin's explanations of descent with modification integrated genealogical and ecological information, so must workers now incorporate historical and nonhistorical, and biological and nonbiological, processes in their evolutionary perspective."—Marvalee H. Wake, Bioscience"This book is well-written and thought-provoking, and should be read by those of us who do not routinely turn to phylogenetic analysis when investigating adaptation, evolutionary ecology and co-evolution."—Mark R. MacNair, Journal of Natural History

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Those who teach college students have extensive training in their disciplines, but unlike their counterparts at the high school or elementary school level, they often have surprisingly little instruction in the craft of teaching itself. "The Chicago Handbook for Teachers" is an extraordinarily helpful guide for anyone facing the daunting challenge of putting together a course and delivering it successfully. The authors offer practical advice for almost any situation a new teacher might face, from preparing a syllabus to managing classroom dynamics. Beginning with a nuts and bolts plan for designing a course, the handbook also explains how to lead a discussion, evaluate your own teaching, give an effective lecture, supervise students' writing and research, create and grade exams, and more. This new edition is thoroughly revised for contemporary concerns, with updated coverage of the use of electronic resources and on the challenge of creating and sustaining an inclusive classroom. Its broad scope and wealth of specific tips will make "The Chicago Handbook for Teachers" useful both as a comprehensive guide for beginning educators and a reference manual for experienced instructors.

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This text looks at the people, ideas and events between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Second Reform Act of 1867. From "John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War", and "Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work" to "Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools" and "Benjanmin Disraeli and the Leap in the Dark", Asa Briggs provides an assessment of Victorian achievements; and in doing so conjures up an enviable picture of the progress and independence of the last century. "For expounding this theme, this interaction of event and personality, Mr. Briggs is abundantly and happily endowed. He is always readable, often amusing, never facetious. He is widely read and widely interested. He has a sound historic judgment, and an unfailing sense for what is significant in the historic sequence and what is merely topical. . . . Above all, he is in sympathy with the age of which he is writing."—Times Literary Supplement

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This collection of 18 articles shows how conceptions of the political are expanded and revised when viewed through the lens of gender. Organized to serve both scholars and students across the social sciences, this book re-examines such basic notions as citizenship, collectivity, political resistance and the state. Section One, "Gender, Citizenship, and Collectivity" includes: Nancy Frazer and Linda Gordon's critique of dependence and citizenship; Iris Young on women as a social collective; Ruth Bloch on the feminization of public virtue in revolutionary America; Trisha Franzen on feminism and lesbian community; and Sonia Kruks on de Beauvoir and feminism. "Collective Action and Women's Resistance", Section Two, features: Louise Tilly's "Paths of Proletarianization"; Temma Kaplan's "Female Consciousness and Collective Action"; and five assessments of women's collective action worldwide - Samira Haj on Palestine, Arlene McLeod on Egypt, Gay Seidman on South Africa, Nancy Sternbach et al on Latin America and Anne Walthall on Japan. A section on gender and the state features: Bronwyn Winter on the law and cultural relativism; Sherene Razack on sexual violence; Wendy Luttrell on educational institutions; Patricia Stamp on ethnic conflict; Elizabeth Schmidt on patriarchy and capitalism; and Muriel Nazzari on post-revolutionary Cuba. These essays originally appeared in "Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society", edited by Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Barbara Laslett.

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This is a full-length biography of Mark Rothko, arguably one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Drawing on exclusive access to his personal papers and over 100 interviews with artists, patrons and dealers, the author tells the story of a life in art: the personal costs and professional triumphs, the convergence of genius and ego, culture and commerce, that defined the New York art scene of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s - the world of Abstract Expressionism, of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning and Kline.

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On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life presents Heinrich Meier’s confrontation with Rousseau’s Rêveries, the philosopher’s most beautiful and daring work, as well as his last and least understood. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of study of Rousseau, Meier unfolds his stunningly original interpretation in two parts. The first part of On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life approaches the Rêveries not as another autobiographical text in the tradition of the Confessions and the Dialogues, but as a reflection on the philosophic life and the distinctive happiness it provides. The second turns to a detailed analysis of a work referred to in the Rêveries, the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” which triggered Rousseau’s political persecution when it was originally published as part of Émile. In his examination of this most controversial of Rousseau’s writings, which aims to lay the foundations for a successful nonphilosophic life, Meier brings to light the differences between natural religion as expressed by the Vicar and Rousseau’s natural theology. Together, the two reciprocally illuminating parts of this study provide an indispensable guide to Rousseau and to the understanding of the nature of the philosophic life. “[A] dense but precise and enthralling analysis.”—New Yorker

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What makes a city endure and prosper? In this masterful survey of a thousand years of urban architecture, Wolfgang Braunfels identified certain themes common to cities as different as Siena and London, Munich and Venice. Most important is an architecture that expresses the city's personality and most particularly its political personality. Braunfels describes and classifies scores of cities--cathedral cities, city-state, maritime cities, imperial cities--and examines the links between their political and architectural histories. Lavishly illustrated with city plans, bird's-eye views, early renderings, and modern photographs, this book will delight and instruct architects, urban planners, historians, and travelers.

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The word "freedom" is so used and abused that it is always in danger of becoming nothing but a cliche. In "Another Freedom", Svetlana Boym offers us a refreshing new portrait of the age-old concept that plays such a crucial role in today's politics. Exploring the rich cross-cultural history of the idea of freedom, from its origins in ancient Greece to the present day, she argues that our attempts to imagine freedom should occupy the space of not only "what is" but also "what if". Beginning with notions of sacrifice and the emergence of a public sphere for politics and art, Boym expands her account to include the relationships between freedom and liberation, personal and political freedom, modernity and terror, and public dissent and creative estrangement. While depicting a world of differences, she affirms lasting solidarities based on the commitment to the public sphere and passionate thinking that reflections on freedom require. To do so, Boym assembles a remarkable cast of characters: Aeschylus and Euripides, Kafka and Mandelstam, Arendt and Heidegger, and a virtual encounter between Dostoevsky and Marx on the streets of Paris. By offering a fresh look at the strange history of this idea, "Another Freedom" delivers a nuanced portrait of freedom, one whose repercussions inform our present and future.

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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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The ideas and terminology of Darwinism are so pervasive these days that it seems impossible to avoid them, let alone imagine a world without them. But in this remarkable rethinking of scientific history, Peter J. Bowler does just that. He asks: What if Charles Darwin had not returned from the voyage of the Beagle and thus did not write "On the Origin of Species"? Would the absence of Darwin's book have led to a different sequence of events, in which biology developed along a track that did not precipitate a great debate about the impact of evolutionism? Would there have been anything equivalent to "social Darwinism," and if so would the alternatives have been less pernicious and misappropriated? In "Darwin Deleted", Bowler argues that no one else was in a position to duplicate Darwin's complete theory of evolution by natural selection. Evolutionary biology would almost certainly have emerged, but through alternative theories, which were frequently promoted by scientists, religious thinkers, and moralists who feared the implications of natural selection. Because non-Darwinian elements of evolutionism flourished for a time in the real world, it is possible to plausibly imagine how they might have developed. Bowler's unique approach enables him to clearly explain the non-Darwinian tradition and fully elucidate the ideas of other scientists, such as Richard Owen and Thomas Huxley, whose work has often been misunderstood because of their distinctive responses to Darwin. "Darwin Deleted" boldly offers a new vision of scientific history. It is one where the sequence of discovery and development could have led to an alternative understanding of the relationship between evolution, heredity, and the environment-and, most significantly, a less contentious relationship between science and religion, avoiding the polarized attitudes that shape the conversation today.

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In this work, John Boswell argues that child abandonment was a common and morally acceptable practice from antiquity until the Renaissance. Using a variety of sources, including drama and mythological-literary texts as well as demographics, Boswell examines evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted chldren, "exposing" them in public places, donating them to the church, or, in later centuries, delivering them to foundling hospitals. This work presents a history of the abandoned child that helps to illustrate the changing meaning of family.

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Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and '80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations and propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. Ever since, the immediate cause of the period's rise in inflation has been extensively debated. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on how the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today's global and increasingly complex economic environment.

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At Columbia University in 1906, William James gave a highly confrontational speech to the American Philosophical Association (APA). He ignored the technical philosophical questions the audience had gathered to discuss and instead addressed the topic of human energy. Trampling on the rules of academic decorum, James invoked the work of amateurs, read testimonials on the benefits of yoga and alcohol, and concluded by urging his listeners to take up this psychological and physiological problem.What was the goal of this unusual speech? Rather than an oddity, Francesca Bordogna asserts that the APA address was emblematic - it was just one of many gestures that James employed as he plowed through the barriers between academic, popular, and pseudoscience, as well as the newly emergent borders between the study of philosophy, psychology, and the "science of man." Bordogna reveals that James' trespassing of boundaries was an essential element of a broader intellectual and social project. By crisscrossing divides, she argues, James imagined a new social configuration of knowledge, a better society, and a new vision of the human self. As the academy moves toward an increasingly interdisciplinary future, "William James at the Boundaries" reintroduces readers to a seminal influence on the way knowledge is pursued.

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Media attention can play a profound role in whether or not officials act on a policy issue, but how policy issues make the news in the first place has remained a puzzle. Why do some issues go viral and then just as quickly fall off the radar? How is it that the media can sustain public interest for months in a complex story like negotiations over Obamacare while ignoring other important issues in favor of stories on "balloon boy"? With Making the News, Amber E. Boydstun offers an eye-opening look at the explosive patterns of media attention that determine which issues are brought before the public. At the heart of her argument is the observation that the media have two modes: an "alarm mode" for breaking stories and a "patrol mode" for covering them in greater depth. While institutional incentives often initiate alarm mode around a story, they also propel news outlets into the watchdog - like patrol mode around its policy implications - until the next big news item breaks. What results from this pattern of fixation followed by rapid change is skewed coverage of policy issues, with a few receiving the majority of media attention while others receive none at all. Boydstun documents this systemic explosiveness and skew through analysis of media coverage across policy issues, including in-depth looks at the waxing and waning coverage around two issues: capital punishment and the "war on terror." Making the News shows how the seemingly unpredictable day-to-day decisions of the newsroom produce distinct patterns of operation with implications - good and bad - for national politics.

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There are more than 1,300 species of bats - or almost a quarter of the world's mammal species. But before you shrink in fear from these furry "creatures of the night," consider the bat's fundamental role in our ecosystem. A single brown bat can eat several thousand insects in a night. Bats also pollinate and disperse the seeds for many of the plants we love, from bananas to mangoes and figs. Bats: A World of Science and Mystery presents these fascinating nocturnal creatures in a new light. Lush, full-color photographs portray bats in flight, feeding, and mating in views that show them in exceptional detail. The photos also take the reader into the roosts of bats, from caves and mines to the tents some bats build out of leaves. A comprehensive guide to what scientists know about the world of bats, the book begins with a look at bats' origins and evolution. The book goes on to address a host of questions related to flight, diet, habitat, reproduction, and social structure: Why do some bats live alone and others in large colonies? When do bats reproduce and care for their young? How has the ability to fly - unique among mammals - influenced bats' mating behavior? A chapter on biosonar, or echolocation, takes readers through the system of high-pitched calls bats emit to navigate and catch prey. More than half of the world's bat species are either in decline or already considered endangered, and the book concludes with suggestions for what we can do to protect these species for future generations to benefit from and enjoy. From the tiny "bumblebee bat" - the world's smallest mammal - to the Giant Golden-Crowned Flying Fox, whose wingspan exceeds five feet, A Battery of Bats presents a panoramic view of one of the world's most fascinating yet least-understood species.

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In contrast to the vast literature on Euclidean geometry as a whole, little has been published on the relatively recent developments in the field of combinatorial geometry. Boltyanskii and Gohberg's book investigates this area, which has undergone particularly rapid growth in the last thirty years. By restricting themselves to two dimensions, the authors make the book uniquely accessible to interested high school students while maintaining a high level of rigor. They discuss a variety of problems on figures of constant width, convex figures, coverings, and illumination. The book offers a thorough exposition of the problem of cutting figures into smaller pieces. The central theorem gives the minimum number of pieces into which a figure can be divided so that all the pieces are of smaller diameter than the original figure. This theorem, which serves as a basis for the rest of the material, is proved for both the Euclidean plane and Minkowski's plane.

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Getting from here to there may be simple for one individual. But as any parent, scout leader, or CEO knows, herding a whole troop in one direction is a lot more complicated. Who leads the group? Who decides where the group will travel, and using what information? How do they accomplish these tasks? "On the Move" addresses these questions, examining the social, cognitive and ecological processes that underlie patterns and strategies of group travel. Chapters discuss how factors such as group size, resource distribution and availability, the costs of travel, predation, social cohesion and cognitive skills affect how individuals as well as social groups exploit their environment. Most chapters focus on field studies of a wide range of human and nonhuman primate groups, from squirrel monkeys to Turkana pastoralists, but chapters covering group travel in hyenas, birds, dolphins and bees provide a broad taxonomic perspective and offer new insights into comparative questions, such as whether primates are unique in their ability to coordinate group-level activities.

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A milestone in feminist literature, this marvelous European romance, narrated by a woman, is considered the first psychological novel in a modern language and a precursor of stream-of-consciousness fiction. Written by Giovanni Boccaccio between 1343 and 1345, The Elegy has never before been available in a complete or accurate English translation. Lady Fiammetta, the first-person narrator and protagonist, recounts how, although a married woman, she falls in love with a handsome young foreigner named Panfilo and, driven by irresistible passion, becomes his lover. Panfilo subsequently abandons Fiammetta and returns to his native land, where his elderly father is said to be dying. When he fails to keep his promise to return, Fiammetta, in what is the heart of the narrative, describes her longings, her anguish, and her despair. A host of contradictory sentiments drive her to desperation and to an unsuccessful suicide attempt. After a time, Fiammetta resumes her futile wait for Panfilo. She finally resolves to seek him out in his native land. Disguising her true intent from her husband, she secures his promise to help her in this undertaking. Addressing an exclusively female audience, Fiammetta warns them about the vicious ways of men. Her whole narrative, in fact, adds up to an indictment of men as both readers and lovers. Eliciting a remarkably wide range of responses from readers and critics, Fiammetta has been variously described as a pathetic victim of male cruelty; an irresponsible fool of a girl; a sophisticated, cunning, and wholly disingenuous female; and, finally, a genuinely modern woman. Whatever judgment we make of her, Fiammetta stands out among medieval women as an ardent and outspoken feminist.

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How should we speak of bodies and souls? In Coming to Mind, Lenn E. Goodman and D. Gregory Caramenico pick their way through the minefields of materialist reductionism to present the soul not as the brain's rival but as its partner. What acts, they argue, is what is real. The soul is not an ethereal wisp but a lively subject, emergent from the body but inadequately described in its terms. Rooted in some of the richest philosophical and intellectual traditions of Western and Eastern philosophy, psychology, literature, and the arts as well as the latest findings of cognitive psychology and brain science - Coming to Mind is a subtle manifesto of a new humanism and an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the human person. Drawing on new and classical understandings of perception, consciousness, memory, agency, and creativity, Goodman and Caramenico frame a convincing argument for a dynamic and integrated self capable of language, thought, discovery, caring, and love.

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This text provides an account of the abbe Jacques-Paul Migne, one of the great entrepreneurs of the 19th century. A priest in Orleans from 1824 to 1833, Migne then moved to Paris, where, in the space of a decade, he built one of the most extensive publishing ventures of all time. Using the latest innovations in print technology, advertising and merchandising, the abbe's assembly-line production and innovative marketing of the massive editions of the Church Fathers placed him at the forefront of France's new commerce. Characterized by the police as one of the great "schemers" of the century, this priest-entrepreneur put the most questionable of business practices in the service of his devotion to Catholicism. Part detective novel, part morality tale, Bloch's narrative should be of interest to scholars of 19th-century French intellectual history, as well as to general readers interested in the history of publishing.

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A piece of Plymouth Rock. A lock of George Washington's hair. Wood from the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. Various bits and pieces of the past - often called "association items" - may appear to be eccentric odds and ends, but they are valued because of their connections to prominent people and events in American history. Kept in museum collections large and small across the United States, such objects are the touchstones of our popular engagement with history. In Sacred Relics, Teresa Barnett explores the history of private collections of items like these, illuminating how Americans view the past. She traces the relic-collecting tradition back to eighteenth-century England, then on to articles belonging to the founding fathers and through the mass collecting of artifacts that followed the Civil War. Ultimately, Barnett shows how we can trace our own historical collecting from the nineteenth century's assemblages of the material possessions of great men and women.

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The first known Chicago Tribune theater review appeared on March 25, 1853. An anonymous notice, it shared the page with two other announcements - one about a pair of thousand-pound hogs set to be slaughtered and another trumpeting the largest load of lumber ever to leave Chicago. "And thus Chicago's priorities were starkly laid out right there on that page," begins Chris Jones in the introduction to this new collection. "Hog butcher for the world and windy self-promoter, specializing in commerce-driven superlatives. The arts came a poor third. Critics would rail against that perceived set of civic priorities for years." The Chicago of today, on the other hand, is regarded as one of the world's premier cities for theater, and no one has had a more consistent front-row seat to its ascendance than the Chicago Tribune theater critics. Bigger, Brighter, Louder weaves together more than 150 years of Tribune reviews into a compelling narrative, pairing full reviews with commentary and history. With a sharp eye for telling details and a keen sense of historical context, Jones, longtime chief Tribune theater critic, takes readers through decades of highs and lows, successes and failures. The book showcases fascinating early reviews of actors and shows that would go on to achieve phenomenal success, including a tryout of A Raisin in the Sun with newcomer Sidney Poitier and the first major review of The Producers. It also delves into the rare and the unusual, such as a previously unpublished Tennessee Williams interview and a long conversation with Edward Albee's mother. Bigger, Brighter, Louder offers a vital store of primary documents about Chicago arts and a riveting look at the history behind the city's rise to theatrical greatness.

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For over fifty years, numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. These two perspectives dominate contemporary views of society, but by rejecting the importance of place they are both deeply flawed. Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, "Great American City" argues that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where you live. To demonstrate the powerfully enduring impact of place, Robert J. Sampson presents here the fruits of over a decade's research in Chicago combined with his own unique personal observations about life in the city, from Cabrini Green to Trump Tower and Millennium Park to the Robert Taylor Homes. He discovers that neighborhoods influence a remarkably wide variety of social phenomena, including crime, health, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, leadership networks, and immigration. Even national crises cannot halt the impact of place, Sampson finds, as he analyzes the consequences of the Great Recession and its aftermath. Following in the influential tradition of the Chicago School of urban studies but updated for the twenty-first century, "Great American City" is at once a landmark research project, a commanding argument for a new theory of social life, and the story of an iconic city.

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In 2003 the Human Genome Project announced that it had achieved a stunning scientific breakthrough: the full map of the human genome, and with it our first complete picture of the basic building block of human life. Since then, boasts about the benefits - and warnings of the dangers - of genomics have remained front-page news. For the nonscientist, the claims and counterclaims are dizzying - what does it really mean to understand the genome? Barry Barnes and John Dupre offer an answer to that question and many more in "Genomes and What to Make of Them", a clear and lively account of the genomic revolution and its promise. The book opens with a brief history of the science of genetics and genomics, from Mendel to Watson and Crick and all the way up to Craig Venter; from there the authors delve into the use of genomics in determining evolutionary paths. Barnes and Dupre then consider both the power and risks of genetics, from the economic potential of plant genomes to overblown claims that certain human genes can be directly tied to such traits as intelligence or homosexuality. Ultimately, the authors argue, we are now living with a new knowledge as powerful in its way as nuclear physics, and the stark choices that face us - between biological warfare and gene therapy, a new eugenics or a new agricultural revolution - will demand the full engagement of both scientists and citizens.

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A political movement rallies against under regulated banks, widening gaps in wealth, and gridlocked governments. Sound familiar? More than a century before Occupy Wall Street, the People's Party of the 1890s was organizing for change. They were the original source of the term "populism," and a catalyst for the later Progressive Era and New Deal. Historians wrote approvingly of the Populists up into the 1950s. But with time and new voices, led by historian Richard Hofstadter, the Populists were denigrated, depicted as demagogic, conspiratorial, and even anti-Semitic. In a landmark study, Walter Nugent set out to uncover the truth of populism, focusing on the most prominent Populist state, Kansas. He focused on primary sources, looking at the small towns and farmers that were the foundation of the movement. The result, The Tolerant Populists, was the first book-length, source-based analysis of the Populists. Nugent's work sparked a movement to undo the historical revisionism and ultimately found itself at the center of a controversy that has been called "one of the bloodiest episodes in American historiography." This timely rerelease of The Tolerant Populists comes as the term finds new currency - and new scorn - in modern politics. A definitive work on populism, it serves as a vivid example of the potential that political movements and popular opinion can have to change history and affect our future.

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Drawing on a trove of previously confidential data, Strained Relations reveals the evolution of US policy regarding currency market intervention, and its interaction with monetary policy. The authors consider how foreign-exchange intervention was affected by changing economic and institutional circumstances - most notably the abandonment of the international gold standard - and how political and bureaucratic factors affected this aspect of public policy.

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As the economies of China, India, and other Asian nations continue to grow, these countries are seeking greater control over the rules that govern international trade. Setting the rules carries with it the power to establish advantage, so it's no surprise that everyone wants a seat at the table-or that negotiations over rules often result in stalemates at meetings of the World Trade Organization. Nowhere is the conflict over rule setting more evident than in the simmering "standards wars" over the rules that define quality and enable the adjudication of disputes. In Global Rivalries, Amy A. Quark explores the questions of how rules are made, who makes them, and how they are enforced, using the lens of cotton - a simple commodity that has become a potent symbol of both the crisis of Western rule - making power and the potential for powerful new rivals to supplant it. Quark traces the strategies for influencing rule-making processes employed not only by national governments but also by transnational corporations, fiber scientists, and trade associations from around the globe. Quark analyzes the efficacy of their approaches and the implications for more marginal actors in the cotton trade, including producers in West Africa. By placing the current contest within the historical development of the global capitalist system, Global Rivalries highlights a fascinating interaction of politics and economics.

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In 1997, after General Motors shuttered a massive complex of factories in the gritty industrial city of Flint, Michigan, workers placed signs around the empty facility reading, "Demolition Means Progress," suggesting that the struggling city could not move forward to greatness until the old plants met the wrecking ball. Much more than a trite slogan, the phrase encapsulates the operating ethos of the nation's metropolitan leadership from at least the 1930s to the present. Throughout, the leaders of Flint and other municipalities repeatedly tried to revitalize their communities by demolishing outdated structures and institutions and overseeing numerous urban renewal campaigns - many of which yielded only a more impoverished and more divided metropolis. After decades of these efforts, the dawn of the twenty-first century found Flint one of the most racially segregated and economically polarized metropolitan areas in the nation. In one of the most comprehensive works yet written on the history of inequality and metropolitan development in modern America, Andrew R. Highsmith uses the case of Flint to explain how the perennial quest for urban renewal - even more than white flight, corporate abandonment, and other forces - contributed to mass suburbanization, racial and economic division, deindustrialization, and political fragmentation. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom about structural inequality and the roots of the nation's urban crisis, Demolition Means Progress shows in vivid detail how public policies and programs designed to revitalize the Flint area ultimately led to the hardening of social divisions.

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Many books have been written about the University of Chicago over its 120-year history, but most of them focus on the intellectual environment, favoring its great thinkers and their many breakthroughs. Yet for the students and scholars who live and work here, the physical university - its stately buildings and beautiful grounds - forms an important part of its character. "Building Ideas: An Architectural Guide to the University of Chicago" explores the environment that has supported more than a century of exceptional thinkers. This photographic guide traces the evolution of campus architecture from the university's founding in 1890 to its plans for the twenty-first century. When William Rainey Harper, the university's first president, and the trustees decided to build a set of Gothic quadrangles, they created a visual link to European precursors and made a bold statement about the future of higher education in the United States. Since then the university has regularly commissioned forward-thinking architects to design buildings that expand - or explode - traditional ideals while redefining the contemporary campus. Full of panoramic photographs and exquisite details, "Building Ideas" features the work of architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Ives Cobb, Holabird & Roche, Eero Saarinen, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Netsch, Ricardo Legorreta, Rafael Vinoly, Cesar Pelli, Helmut Jahn, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. The guide also includes guest commentaries by prominent architects and other notable public figures. It is the perfect collection for Chicago alumni and students, Hyde Park residents and visitors, and anyone inspired by the institutional ideas and aspirations of architecture.

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In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences - psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others - and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people - Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others - and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a "Cold War rationality." Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality - optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical - in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

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