A powerful statement about the repercussions of discrimination and the benefits of diversity in architecture
Providing hard data for trends that many perceive only vaguely and some deny altogether, Designing for Diversity reveals a profession rife with gender and racial discrimination and examines the aspects of architectural practice that hinder or support the full participation of women and persons of color.
Drawing on interviews and surveys of hundreds of architects, Kathryn H. Anthony outlines some of the forms of discrimination that recur most frequently in architecture: being offered added responsibility without a commensurate rise in position, salary, or credit; not being allowed to engage in client contact, field experience, or construction supervision; and being confined to certain kinds of positions, typically interior design for women, government work for African Americans, and computer-aided design for Asian American architects.
Anthony discusses the profession's attitude toward flexible schedules, part-time contracts, and the demands of family and identifies strategies that have helped underrepresented individuals advance in the profession, especially establishing a strong relationship with a mentor. She also observes a strong tendency for underrepresented architects to leave mainstream practice, either establishing their own firms, going into government or corporate work, or abandoning the field altogether.
Given the traditional mismatch between diverse consumers and predominantly white male producers of the built environment, plus the shifting population balance toward communities of color, Anthony contends that the architectural profession staves off true diversity at its own peril. Designing for Diversity argues convincingly that improving the climate for nontraditional architects will do much to strengthen architecture as a profession. Practicing architects, managers of firms, and educators will learn how to create conditions more welcoming to a diversity of users as well as designers of the built environment.
How are greenways designed? What situations lead to their genesis, and what examples best illustrate their potential for enhancing communities and the environment? Designing greenways is a key to protecting landscapes, allowing wildlife to move freely, and finding appropriate ways to bring people into nature. This book brings together examples from ecology, conservation biology, aquatic ecology, and recreation design to illustrate how greenways function and add value to ecosystems and human communities alike.
Encompassing everything from urban trail corridors to river floodplains to wilderness-like linkages, greenways preserve or improve the integrity of the landscape, not only by stemming the loss of natural features, but also by engendering new natural and social functions. From 19th-century parks and parkways to projects still on the drawing boards, Designing Greenways is a fascinating introduction to the possibilities-and pitfalls-involved in these ambitious projects. As towns and cities look to greenways as a new way of reconciling man and nature, designers and planners will look to Designing Greenways as an invaluable compendium of best practices.
In 2006 anthropologists Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett set out to rethink the role that human sciences play in biological research, creating the Human Practices division of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center—a facility established to create design standards for the engineering of new enzymes, genetic circuits, cells, and other biological entities—to formulate a new approach to the ethical, security, and philosophical considerations of controversial biological work. They sought not simply to act as watchdogs but to integrate the biosciences with their own discipline in a more fundamentally interdependent way, inventing a new, dynamic, and experimental anthropology that they could bring to bear on the center’s biological research.
Designing Human Practices is a detailed account of this anthropological experiment and, ultimately, its rejection. It provides new insights into the possibilities and limitations of collaboration, and diagnoses the micro-politics which effectively constrained the potential for mutual scientific flourishing. Synthesizing multiple disciplines, including biology, genetics, anthropology, and philosophy, alongside a thorough examination of funding entities such as the National Science Foundation, Designing Human Practices pushes the social study of science into new and provocative territory, utilizing a real-world experience as a springboard for timely reflections on how the human and life sciences can and should transform each other.
This fascinating book examines the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), a loosely organized association of ambitious and influential planners who hoped to guide the new urban and industrial developments of the early twentieth century and thereby design a radically improved America. After discussing the roots of this effort in the Progressive and World War I periods, Edward K. Spann traces the development of the RPAA from its formation in 1923 through the decades of its greatest effort (which ended in 1934) to its decline and ultimate demise in the late 1930s. Taking a biographical approach and drawing on both published works and private correspondence, the book focuses on the richly varied thoughts and activities of the leading members of the RPAA regarding significant aspects of urban and regional planning.
The members of the RPAA discussed here include Charles Harris Whitaker, Frederick L. Ackerman, Robert D. Kohn, Benton MacKaye, Clarence Stein, Lewis Mumford, Henry Wright, Robert Bruere, Stuart Chase, Edith Elmer Wood, and Catherine Bauer. Spann threads together the philosophies and work of these individuals by focusing on important points in the movement's history, such as the emergence of a community housing movement in World War I, the development of Benton MacKaye's seminal idea of the Appalachian Trail as an instrument for rural reconstruction, and Lewis Mumford's efforts to foster the idealism he thought necessary for successful planning. Spann also looks at Clarence Stein's work with regional planning in New York State during the governorship of Alfred E. Smith; the birth of the RPAA and its early publicity efforts, which culminated in the famous regional planning issue of Survey Graphic; the RPAA's differences with the Regional Plan of New York; the relationship between the RPAA and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression; and the early years of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
This work should appeal not only to students of city and regional planning, of architecture, and of environmentalism, but to all those interested in the intellectual developments of the period between 1914 and 1938, especially as they relate to an important phase of modernization in the United States.
British culture is marked by indelible icons—red double-decker buses, large oak wardrobes, and the compact sleekness of the Mini. But British industrial and product design have long lived in the shadows of architecture and fashion. Cheryl Buckley here delves into the history of British design culture, and in doing so uniquely tracks the evolution of the British national identity.
Designing Modern Britain demonstrates how interior design, ceramics, textiles, and furniture craft of the twentieth century contain numerous hallmark examples of British design. The book explores topics connected to the British design aesthetic, including the spread of international modernism, the eco-conscious designs of the 1980s and 1990s, and the influence of celebrity product designers and their labels. Buckley also investigates popular nostalgia in recent times, considering how museum and gallery exhibitions have been instrumental in reimagining Britain’s past and how the heritage industry has fueled a growing trend among designers of employing images of British culture in their work.
Coinciding with the centennial of the Pan American Union (now the Organization of American States), González explores how nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. architects and their clients built a visionary Pan-America to promote commerce and cultural exchange between United States and Latin America.
Late in the nineteenth century, U.S. commercial and political interests began eyeing the countries of Latin America as plantations, farms, and mines to be accessed by new shipping lines and railroads. As their desire to dominate commerce and trade in the Western Hemisphere grew, these U.S. interests promoted the concept of "Pan-Americanism" to link the United States and Latin America and called on U.S. architects to help set the stage for Pan-Americanism's development. Through international expositions, monuments, and institution building, U.S. architects translated the concept of a united Pan-American sensibility into architectural or built form. In the process, they also constructed an artificial ideological identity—a fictional Pan-America peopled with imaginary Pan-American citizens, the hemispheric loyalists who would support these projects and who were the presumed benefactors of this presumed architecture of unification.
Designing Pan-America presents the first examination of the architectural expressions of Pan-Americanism. Concentrating on U.S. architects and their clients, Robert Alexander González demonstrates how they proposed designs reflecting U.S. presumptions and projections about the relationship between the United States and Latin America. This forgotten chapter of American architecture unfolds over the course of a number of international expositions, ranging from the North, Central, and South American Exposition of 1885–1886 in New Orleans to Miami's unrealized Interama fair and San Antonio's HemisFair '68 and encompassing the Pan American Union headquarters building in Washington, D.C. and the creation of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse in the Dominican Republic.
The movement toward creating more sustainable communities has been growing for decades, and in recent years has gained new prominence with the increasing visibility of planning approaches such as the New Urbanism. Yet there are few examples of successful and time-tested sustainable communities.
Village Homes outside of Davis, California offers one such example. Built between 1975 and 1981 on 60 acres of land, it offers unique features including extensive common areas and green space; community gardens, orchards, and vineyards; narrow streets; pedestrian and bike paths; solar homes; and an innovative ecological drainage system. Authors Judy and Michael Corbett were intimately involved with the design, development, and building of Village Homes, and have resided there since 1977.
In Designing Sustainable Communities, they examine the history of the sustainable community movement and discuss how Village Homes fits into the context of that movement. They offer an inside look at the development of the project from start to finish, describing how the project came about, obstacles that needed to be overcome, design approaches they took, problems that were encountered and how those problems were solved, and changes that have occurred over the years. In addition, they compare Village Homes with other communities and developments across the country, and discuss the future prospects for the continued growth of the sustainable communities movement.
The book offers detailed information on a holistic approach to designing and building successful communities. It represents an invaluable guide for professionals and students involved with planning, architecture, development, and landscape architecture, and for anyone interested increating more sustainable communities.
Written in a clear and engaging style, Designing the City is a practical manual for improving the way communities are planned, designed, and built. It presents a wealth of information on design and decision-making, including advice on how citizens and activists can make their voices heard, and numerous examples of effective strategies for working with all parties involved in neighborhood and community development. It highlights proven models and strategies to help communities:
The vision of a garden shared peacefully by humans and animals is a familiar, but elusive, landscape trope. Whether threatened by habitat destruction or climate change, displaced by urbanization or invasive species, poisoned by industrial toxins, or hunted to extinction, many wild animals have failed to thrive in the company of people. There is growing scientific consensus that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction in earth history—and the first caused by human activities.
What agency can landscape architects and garden designers have in conserving or restoring wildlife diversity? Designing Wildlife Habitats gathers essays by designers, scientists, and historians to explore how they might better collaborate to promote zoological biodiversity and how scientific ambitions might be expressed in culturally significant and historically informed design. Established conservation practices within ecology have begun to shape landscape architecture, and current initiatives in ecosystem services, restoration ecology, and designer-generated ecological experiments provide an enlarged role for landscape architects in the creation of productive habitats. Design has become increasingly instrumental to both the appearance and the ecological function of landscapes.
Both Rabinow and Marcus participated in the milestone collection Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Published in 1986, Writing Culture catalyzed a reassessment of how ethnographers encountered, studied, and wrote about their subjects. In the opening conversations of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, Rabinow and Marcus take stock of anthropology’s recent past by discussing the intellectual scene in which Writing Culture intervened, the book’s contributions, and its conceptual limitations. Considering how the field has developed since the publication of that volume, they address topics including ethnography’s self-reflexive turn, scholars’ increased focus on questions of identity, the Public Culture project, science and technology studies, and the changing interests and goals of students. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary allows readers to eavesdrop on lively conversations between anthropologists who have helped to shape their field’s recent past and are deeply invested in its future.
The twentieth century was the most destructive in human history, but from its vast landscapes of ruins was born a new architectural type: the cultural monument. In the wake of World War I, an international movement arose which aimed to protect architectural monuments in large numbers, and regardless of style, hoping not only to keep them safe from future conflicts, but also to make them worthy of protection from more quotidian forms of destruction. This movement was motivated by hopeful idealism as much as by a pragmatic belief in bureaucracy. An evolving group—including architects, intellectuals, art historians, archaeologists, curators, and lawyers—grew out of the new diplomacy of the League of Nations. During and after World War II, it became affiliated with the Allied Military Government, and was eventually absorbed by the UN as UNESCO. By the 1970s, this organization had begun granting World Heritage status to a global register of significant sites—from buildings to bridges, shrines to city centers, ruins to colossi.
Examining key episodes in the history of this preservation effort—including projects for the Parthenon, for the Cathedral of St-Lô, the temples of Abu Simbel, and the Bamyian Buddahs —Lucia Allais demonstrates how the group deployed the notion of culture to shape architectural sites, and how architecture in turn shaped the very idea of global culture. More than the story of an emergent canon, Designs of Destruction emphasizes how the technical project of ensuring various buildings’ longevity jolted preservation into establishing a transnational set of codes, values, practices. Yet as entire nations’ monumental geographies became part of survival plans, Allais also shows, this paradoxically helped integrate technologies of destruction—from bombs to bulldozers—into cultural governance. Thus Designs of Destruction not only offers a fascinating narrative of cultural diplomacy, based on extensive archival findings; it also contributes an important new chapter in the intellectual history of modernity by showing the manifold ways architectural form is charged with concretizing abstract ideas and ideals, even in its destruction.
It is a story that has gone down in the annals of American art history: a New Yorker visiting upstate Hoosick Falls is entranced by four pictures hanging in the window of a drugstore. Investigating further, he learns they are the handiwork of a 78-year-old widow. Thus begins the rise to fame of Grandma Moses—farmwife, painter, and unlikely celebrity.
In this book Karal Ann Marling, distinguished observer of American visual culture, looks at Grandma Moses as a cultural phenomenon of the postwar period and explores the meaning of her subject matter—and her astonishing fame. What did the “Greatest Generation” see in her simple renderings of people, young and old, tapping maple trees for syrup, making apple butter, gliding across snowy fields on sleighs? Why did Bob Hope, Irving Berlin, and Harry Truman all love her—and the art czars of New York openly despise her? Through the flood of Moses merchandise—splashed across Christmas cards, dishware, yard goods, and gewgaws of every kind—Marling traces the resonances that these “primitive” images struck in an America awkwardly adjusting to a new era of technology, suburbia, and Cold War tensions.
Between the cultural ephemera, folklore, song, and history embedded in Moses’s paintings and the potent advertising shorthand for Americana that her images rapidly became, this book reveals the widespread longing for the memories, comforts, and small victories of a mythic, intimate American past tapped by the phenomenon—in art and commerce alike—of Grandma Moses.
In this study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin W. Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire. He further suggests that the rise of vernacular fiction during the late Ming dynasty should be studied in the context of contemporary debates on desire, along with the new and complex views that emerged from those debates.
Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China shows that the obsession of authors with individual desire is an essential quality that defines traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre. Thus the maturation of the genre can best be appreciated in terms of its increasingly sophisticated exploration of the phenomenon of desire.
The Desire of Psychoanalysis proposes that recognizing how certain theoretical and institutional problems in Lacanian psychoanalysis are grounded in the historical conditions of Lacan’s own thinking might allow us to overcome these impasses. In order to accomplish this, Gabriel Tupinambá analyzes the socioeconomic practices that underlie the current institutional existence of the Lacanian community—its political position as well as its institutional history—in relation to theoretical production.
By focusing on the underlying dynamic that binds clinical practice, theoretical work, and institutional security in Lacanian psychoanalysis today, Tupinambá is able to locate sites for conceptual innovation that have been ignored by the discipline, such as the understanding of the role of money in clinical practice, the place of analysands in the transformation of psychoanalytic theory, and ideological dead-ends that have become common sense in the Lacanian field. The Desire of Psychoanalysis thus suggests ways of opening up psychoanalysis to new concepts and clinical practices and calls for a transformation of how psychoanalysis is understood as an institution.
Drawing on her research over the past two decades among urban residents and rural migrants in Hangzhou and Beijing, Rofel analyzes the meanings that individuals attach to various public cultural phenomena and what their interpretations say about their understandings of post-socialist China and their roles within it. She locates the first broad-based public debate about post-Mao social changes in the passionate dialogues about the popular 1991 television soap opera Yearnings. She describes how the emergence of gay identities and practices in China reveals connections to a transnational network of lesbians and gay men at the same time that it brings urban/rural and class divisions to the fore. The 1999–2001 negotiations over China’s entry into the World Trade Organization; a controversial women’s museum; the ways that young single women portray their longings in relation to the privations they imagine their mothers experienced; adjudications of the limits of self-interest in court cases related to homoerotic desire, intellectual property, and consumer fraud—Rofel reveals all of these as sites where desiring subjects come into being.
Topics include the study of "crip theory" and queer/disabled performance artists; the historical emergence of normalcy and parallel notions of military fitness that require both the production and the containment of queerness and disability; and butch identity, transgressive sexual practices, and rheumatoid arthritis.
Contributors. Sarah E. Chinn, Eli Clare, Naomi Finkelstein, Catherine Lord, Cris Mayo, Robert McRuer, Todd Ramlow, Jo Rendell, Ellen Samuels, Carrie Sandahl, David Serlin, Patrick White
Throughout his life, John Donne was well acquainted with the consequences of desire. He wanted a courtly career badly enough to renounce the Catholicism of his childhood. Later, he wanted a woman badly enough to gamble that career for her sake; he lost, but found a new calling in the Anglican Church. There he pursued philosophical and theological questions with an intensity to match his former social ambitions, and was not above addressing God Himself in tones of "immoderate desire." Death became his ultimate object of passionate attention; and ever since that final consummation, critics have argued over the nature and import of Donne's desires, while simultaneously (if not always self-consciously) revealing a great deal about their own.
Saunders explores this dialectic of desire, re-evaluating both Donne's poetry and the complex responses it has inspired, from his earliest readers to his recent professional critics. In the process, Saunders considers an extraordinary range of topics, including the technology of the book, prosodic theory, the problem of misogyny, the history of sexuality, and even the purpose of criticism itself; remarkably, he does so while keeping Donne's poetry in focus at all times.
Witty, erudite, theoretically engaged, but intensely readable, this study takes into account recent developments in the fields of historicism, feminism, queer theory, and postmodern psychoanalysis, while offering dazzling close readings of many of Donne's most famous poems.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Sonnets from the Portuguese.Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism proposes that we attend to the ways that women poets from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries have both echoed and transformed the literary and erotic conventions that strongly influenced their fates as women, wives, and lovers.
Mary B. Moore analyzes and provides context for love sonnet sequences by Italian, French, English, and American women poets in the light of current knowledge concerning attitudes towards women at the time they wrote. Through close readings of the poems combined with theory and criticism about constructs of women, historical events, and biographical contexts, Moore reveals patterns of revision among women poets that shed further light on the poets themselves, on Petrarchism as a convention, and on ideas about women. She focuses on Petrarchan sonnet sequences by women because the poems serve both as works of art and as documents that illuminate the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects (agents of speech, action, knowledge, and desire) as well as their more usual roles as erotic objects.
Combining theory with close reading, Moore enhances the value of many generally neglected poems by women. After a thorough discussion of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, she analyzes the work of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labé, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Ice-Age Eastern Europe was an inhospitable place, isolated from the moderating influence of oceans. Unlike Western Europe, which was settled over half a million years ago, Eastern Europe remained largely unoccupied until the appearance of the cold-adapted Neanderthals. When modern humans arrived from southern latitudes, they were anatomically less suited to colder climates, but successfully colonized Eastern Europe with the aid of innovative technologies that their Neanderthal predecessors lacked.
John F. Hoffecker provides an overview of Pleistocene or Ice-Age settlement in Eastern Europe with a heavy focus on the adaptations of Neanderthals and modern humans to this harsh environmental setting. Hoffecker argues that the Eastern European record reveals a stark contrast between Neanderthals and modern humans with respect to technology and social organization, both of which are tied to the development of language and the use of symbols. Desolate Landscapes will bring readers up to date with the rich archaeological record in this significant region and its contribution to our understanding of one of our most important events in human evolution - the rise of modern humans and the extinction of the Neanderthals.
The book is divided into seven chapters. The first discusses general anthropological principles and theories pertaining to human adaptation and development in cold environments. The second outlines the environmental conditions of the specific area under study in the book.
The next two chapters focus on Neanderthal finds in the area. The following two chapters discuss the replacement of the local Neanderthal population by the Cro-magnons, and the development of their way of life in the cold Loess Steppe environment. The final chapter summarizes the discussion and is followed by an extremely valuable and extensive bibliography, more than half of which consists of non-English (primarily Russian) sources.
A Telegraph Book of the Year
A Washington Post Notable Work
A Times Book of the Year
A Hughes Award Finalist
“An indisputable masterpiece…comprehensive, fascinating, and persuasive.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Brimming with wisdom and brio, this masterful work spans the history of psychiatry. Exceedingly well-researched, wide-ranging, provocative in its conclusions, and magically compact, it is riveting from start to finish. Mark my words, Desperate Remedies will soon be a classic.”
—Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire
“Compulsively readable…Scull has joined his wide-ranging reporting and research with a humane perspective on matters that many of us continue to look away from.”
—Daphne Merkin, The Atlantic
"Scull's fascinating and enraging book is the story of the quacks and opportunists who have claimed to offer cures for mental illness...Madness remains the most fascinating—arguably the defining—aspect of Homo sapiens."
—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times
“I would recommend this fascinating, alarming, and alerting book to anybody. For anyone referred to a psychiatrist it is surely essential.”
—The Spectator
For more than two hundred years disturbances of the mind have been studied and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, some insist, is a disease like any other, from which one can be cured. But is this true?
From the birth of the asylum to the latest drug trials, Desperate Remedies brings together a galaxy of mind doctors working in and out of institutional settings: psychologists and psychoanalysts, neuroscientists and cognitive behavioral therapists, as well as patients and their families desperate for relief. Surprising, disturbing, and compelling, this passionate account of America’s long battle with mental illness challenges us to revisit some of our deepest assumptions and to confront the epidemic of mental illness so visible all around us.
Killed by kindness, stifled by overprotection, choked by subtle if sometimes unconscious snubs, the physically handicapped are one of the world's most invisible minorities. Seeking to draw attention to the various attitudes and perceptions about the handicapped, renowned poet Vassar Miller has assembled this collection of short stories and poems culled from the best of contemporary literature.
The forty-five works focus on characters with motor and/or sensory disabilities. Ranging from optimistic to embittered and from sentimental to realistic, they portray the handicapped and the family; the handicapped and society; the myth of the holy idiot; the handicapped as human being, good, evil, and indifferent; the handicapped as unique. Both instructional and entertaining, this book will be of interest to a wide variety of readers, including the handicapped themselves. It will be especially helpful to professionals in the medical, education, and social service fields. As Vassar Miller says in her introduction, "... the book is meant as a midwife in bringing to birth a renewed understanding of all human beings as so many mirrors of God, however seemingly distorted ..."
An informative handbook and introduction to the Midwest's colorful past, Destination Heartland provides travelers with a knowledgeable companion on the highways and backroads of history.
States covered in the book: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
Men and women remain unequal in the United States, but in this provocative book, Robert Max Jackson demonstrates that gender inequality is irrevocably crumbling. Destined for Equality, the first integrated analysis of gender inequality's modern decline, tells the story of that progressive movement toward equality over the past two centuries in America, showing that women's status has risen consistently and continuously.
Jackson asserts that women's rising status has been due largely to the emergence of modern political and economic organizations, which have transformed institutional priorities concerning gender. Although individual politicians and businessmen generally believed women should remain in their traditional roles, Jackson shows that it was simply not in the interests of modern enterprise and government to foster inequality. The search for profits, votes, organizational rationality, and stability all favored a gender-neutral approach that improved women's status. The inherent gender impartiality of organizational interests won out over the prejudiced preferences of the men who ran them.
As economic power migrated into large-scale organizations inherently indifferent to gender distinctions, the patriarchal model lost its social and cultural sway, and women's continual efforts to rise in the world became steadily more successful. Total gender equality will eventually prevail; the only questions remaining are what it will look like, and how and when it will arrive.
Where did humanity get the idea that outer space is a frontier waiting to be explored? Destined for the Stars unravels the popularization of the science of space exploration in America between 1944 and 1955, arguing that the success of the US space program was due not to technological or economic superiority, but was sustained by a culture that had long believed it was called by God to settle new frontiers and prepare for the inevitable end of time and God’s final judgment. Religious forces, Newell finds, were in no small way responsible for the crescendo of support for and interest in space exploration in the early 1950s, well before Project Mercury—the United States’ first human spaceflight program—began in 1959.
In this remarkable history, Newell explores the connection between the art of Chesley Bonestell—the father of modern space art whose paintings drew inspiration from depictions of the American West—and the popularity of that art in Cold War America; Bonestell’s working partnership with science writer and rocket expert Willy Ley; and Ley and Bonestell’s relationship with Wernher von Braun, father of both the V-2 missile and the Saturn V rocket, whose millennial conviction that God wanted humankind to leave Earth and explore other planets animated his life’s work. Together, they inspired a technological and scientific faith that awoke a deep-seated belief in a sense of divine destiny to reach the heavens. The origins of their quest, Newell concludes, had less to do with the Cold War strife commonly associated with the space race and everything to do with the religious culture that contributed to the invention of space as the final frontier.
A little-known fact about the prominent US psychologist and educator Carl E. Seashore (1866–1949) is that he was deeply involved in the American eugenics movement. He was among the US academics to support eugenics long before German Nazis embraced it. A titan in a host of disciplines and a proponent of radical education reform, Seashore used his positional power to promote a constellation of education reforms consistent with central precepts of eugenics. Many of these reforms, including tracking, gifted and talented programs, and high-stakes standardized testing, were adopted and remain standard practice in the United States today. He promulgated the idea that musical talent is biologically inheritable, and he developed the first standardized tests of musical talent; these tests were used by early-twentieth-century researchers in their attempts to determine whether there are race differences in musical talent. Seashore’s ideas and work profoundly shaped music education’s research trajectory, as well as enduring “commonsense” beliefs about musical ability. An intersectional analysis, “Destined to Fail” focuses on the relationship between eugenics and Seashore’s views on ability, race, and gender. Koza concludes that Seashore promoted eugenics and its companion, euthenics, because he was a true believer. She also discusses the longstanding silences surrounding Seashore’s participation in eugenics. As a diagnosis and critique of the present, “Destined to Fail” identifies resemblances and connections between past and present that illustrate the continuing influence of eugenics—and the systems of reasoning that made early-twentieth-century eugenics imaginable and seem reasonable—on education discourse and practice today. It maps out discursive, citational, and funding connections between eugenicists of the early twentieth-century and contemporary White supremacists; this mapping leads to some of Donald Trump’s supporters and appointees.
Last winter, a man tried to break Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain sculpture. The sculpted foot of Michelangelo’s David was damaged in 1991 by a purportedly mentally ill artist. With each incident, intellectuals must confront the unsettling dynamic between destruction and art. Renowned art historian Dario Gamboni is the first to tackle this weighty issue in depth, exploring specters of censorship, iconoclasm, and vandalism that surround such acts.
Gamboni uncovers here a disquieting phenomenon that still thrives today worldwide. As he demonstrates through analyses of incidents occurring in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and Europe, a complex relationship exists among the evolution of modern art, destruction of artworks, and the long history of iconoclasm. From the controversial removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc from New York City’s Federal Plaza to suffragette protests at London’s National Gallery, Gamboni probes the concept of artist’s rights, the power of political protest and how iconoclasm sheds light on society’s relationship to art and material culture.
Compelling and thought-provoking, The Destruction of Art forces us to rethink the ways that we interact with art and react to its power to shock or subdue.
Historians have long been perplexed by the complete disappearance of the medieval Chinese aristocracy by the tenth century—the “great clans” that had dominated China for centuries. In this book, Nicolas Tackett resolves the enigma of their disappearance, using new, digital methodologies to analyze a dazzling array of sources.
Tackett systematically mines thousands of funerary biographies excavated in recent decades—most of them never before examined by scholars—while taking full advantage of the explanatory power of Geographic Information System (GIS) methods and social network analysis. Tackett supplements these analyses with extensive anecdotes culled from epitaphs, prose literature, and poetry, bringing to life women and men who lived a millennium in the past. The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy demonstrates that the great Tang aristocratic families adapted to the social, economic, and institutional transformations of the seventh and eighth centuries far more successfully than previously believed. Their political influence collapsed only after a large number were killed during three decades of extreme violence following Huang Chao’s sack of the capital cities in 880 CE.
Detachment from Place is the first comparative and interdisciplinary volume on the archaeology of settlement abandonment, with contributions focusing on materiality, ideology, the environment, and social construction of space. The volume sheds new light on an important but underexamined aspect of settlement abandonment wherein sedentary groups undergoing the process of abandonment leave behind many meaningful elements of their inhabited landscape. The process of detaching from place—which could last centuries—transformed inhabitants into migrants and transformed settled, constructed, and agricultural landscapes into imagined ones that continued to figure significantly in the identities of migrant groups.
Drawing on case studies from the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the volume explores how relationships between ancient peoples and the places they lived were transformed as they migrated elsewhere. Contributors focus on social structure, ecology, and ideology to study how people and places both disentangled from each other and remained tied together during this process. From Huron-Wendat villages and Classic Maya palaces to historical villages in Togo and the great Southeast Asian Medieval capital of Bagan, specific cultural, historical, and environmental factors led ancient peoples to detach from their homes and embark on migrations that altered social memory and cultural identity—as evidenced in the archaeological record.
Detachment from Place provides new insights into transfigurations of community identity, political organization, social and economic relations, religion, warfare, and agricultural practices and will be of interest to landscape archaeologists as well as researchers focused on collective memory, population movement, migratory patterns, and interaction.
Contributors:
Tomas Q. Barrientos, Jennifer Birch, Eduardo José Bustamante Luna, Catherine M. Cameron, Marcello A. Canuto, Jeffrey H. Cohen, Michael D. Danti, Phillip de Barros, Pete Demarte, Donna M. Glowacki, Gyles Iannone, Louis Lesage, Patricia A. McAnany, Asa R. Randall, Kenneth E. Sassaman
Zwartjes’s beautifully crafted poetic prose humanizes the technical descriptions of medical conditions and illuminates the scientific understanding of emotional states. Far more than a popularization of science, Detailing Trauma explores the wondrous anatomy and physiology of the human body, a geography of our human frailties—and also our wealth, as humans, of love and hope and the capacity for meditative thought.
In Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, Satoru Saito sheds light on the deep structural and conceptual similarities between detective fiction and the novel in prewar Japan. Arguing that the interactions between the two genres were not marginal occurrences but instead critical moments of literary engagement, Saito demonstrates how detective fiction provided Japanese authors with the necessary frameworks through which to examine and critique the nature and implications of Japan’s literary formations and its modernizing society.
Through a series of close readings of literary texts by canonical writers of Japanese literature and detective fiction, including Tsubouchi Shoyo, Natsume Soseki, Shimazaki Toson, Sato Haruo, Kuroiwa Ruiko, and Edogawa Ranpo, Saito explores how the detective story functioned to mediate the tenuous relationships between literature and society as well as between subject and authority that made literary texts significant as political acts. By foregrounding the often implicit and contradictory strategies of literary texts—choice of narrative forms, symbolic mappings, and intertextual evocations among others—this study examines in detail the intricate interactions between detective fiction and the novel that shaped the development of modern Japanese literature.
Community Life Among the Urban Elderly
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press