A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Individuals and political systems alike, Jones argues, tend to be attentive to only one issue at a time. Using numerous examples from elections, public opinion polls, congressional deliberations, and of bureaucratic decision-making, he shows how shifting attentiveness can and does alter choices and political outcomes—even when underlying preferences remain relatively fixed. An individual, for example, may initially decide to vote for a candidate because of her stand on spending but change his vote when he learns of her position on abortion, never really balancing the two options.
Levin-Waldman argues that if American public policy were to be evaluated against a different set of principles—ones more closely aligned with core liberal values, especially the common good—liberalism would be in greater harmony with contemporary public opinion and thought.
Liberalism rests on a moral vision of what constitutes the good life and a set of principles that can measure whether public policy accords with society's underlying philosophical principles. Levin-Waldman faults modern liberalism for obscuring these principles through a misplaced reliance on neutrality. Liberalism, he contends, appears to have diverged from mainstream perceptions of traditional American values because policy is debated and formulated within the confines of this neutrality standard.
Levin-Waldman develops a new methodology intended to take us away from the usual cost-benefit analysis and move us closer to assessing public policies in terms of what best serves the common good.
The contributors draw on perspectives from political science, history, cultural studies, art history, anthropology, feminist theory, sexuality and queer studies, and Caribbean and African American studies. The collection addresses transnational discourses of race, gender, and sexuality in African diaspora politics, African diaspora experiences on the African continent, the politics of African-descended peoples in Europe, and creative uses of the discourses of memory and diaspora to support political organizing and local struggles. Essays on Venezuelans, Bolivians, and Mexicans address the status of race in the study of African-descended populations and cultures in Latin America. The issue also includes two essays that showcase African diasporic art and curatorial practices in the United States, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom.
Contributors: Erica Ball, Anthony Bogues, Lisa Brock, Sara Busdiecker, Prudence Cumberbatch,Jacqueline Francis, Anita González, Amoaba Gooden, Dayo Gore, Laura A. Harris, Christopher J. Lee, Kevin Mumford, Melina Pappademos, Cristóbal Valencia Ramírez, Rochelle Rowe, Theresa Runstedtler, Michelle Ann Stephens, Tyler Stovall, Deborah Thomas, Leon Wainwright, Cadence Wynter, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Peter J. Bowler argues that unlike the United States, where a strong fundamentalist opposition to evolutionism developed in the 1920s (most famously expressed in the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925), in Britain there was a concerted effort to reconcile science and religion. Intellectually conservative scientists championed the reconciliation and were supported by liberal theologians in the Free Churches and the Church of England, especially the Anglican "Modernists." Popular writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw sought to create a non-Christian religion similar in some respects to the Modernist position. Younger scientists and secularists—including Rationalists such as H. G. Wells and the Marxists—tended to oppose these efforts, as did conservative Christians, who saw the liberal position as a betrayal of the true spirit of their religion. With the increased social tensions of the 1930s, as the churches moved toward a neo-orthodoxy unfriendly to natural theology and biologists adopted the "Modern Synthesis" of genetics and evolutionary theory, the proposed reconciliation fell apart.
Because the tensions between science and religion—and efforts at reconciling the two—are still very much with us today, Bowler's book will be important for everyone interested in these issues.
Poston led his party through Sonora and the territory of the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, which today encompasses southern Arizona and a portion of southern New Mexico. The syndicate’s charge to the young adventurer was to acquire land in Mexico in anticipation of the Gadsden Purchase and the building of the transcontinental railroad. Reconnaissance in Sonora details Poston’s expedition, including the founding of the town of Colorado City at the site of present-day Yuma, Arizona.
C. Gilbert Storms explores the American ideas of territorial expansion and Manifest Destiny, the national debate over a route for a transcontinental railroad, the legends of rich gold and silver mines in northern Mexico, and the French and American filibusters that plagued northern Mexico in the early 1850s.
Although Montreal has been a bilingual city since 1760 and demographically dominated by French-speakers for well over a century and a quarter, it was not until the late 1960s that full-fledged challenges to the city’s English character emerged. Since then. two decades of agitation over la question linguistique as well as the enactment of three language laws have altered the places of French and English in Montreal‘s schools, public administration, economy. and even commercial signs. In this book, Marc Levine examines the nature of this stunning transformation and, in particular, the role of public policy in promoting it.
The reconquest of Montreal by the French-speaking majority makes for interesting history. It includes episodes of intense conflict and occasional violence and tells the fascinating story of how an economically disadvantaged and culturally threatened linguistic community mobilized politically and used the state to redistribute group power in Canada’s second largest city. In addition, the history of Montreal’s language question offers analysts of urban politics and public policy an excellent case study of some of the central issues facing cities containing more than one major linguistic community.
After tracing the politicization of the language question in the 1960s and 1970s, Levine analyzes the impact of the three controversial language laws penacted by the Quebec provincial government between 1969 and 1977. Exhaustively researched, The Reconquest of Montreal is the definitive study of the most explosive issue in Quebec political life.
In the series Conflicts in Urban and Regional Development, edited by John R. Logan and Todd Swanstrom.
Contributors: Lisa Arellano, Erica L. Ball, Josh Cerretti, Jonathan Culleton, Amanda Frisken, Raphael Ginsberg, Deana Heath, Efeoghene Igor, Catherine Jacquet, Jessie Kindig, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Jen Manion, Xhercis Méndez, Luis Morán, Claudia Salamanca, Tomoko Seto, Carla Tsampiras, Jennifer Yeager
Drawing on the controversial case of “Ashley X,” a girl with severe developmental disabilities who received interventionist medical treatment to limit her growth and keep her body forever small—a procedure now known as the “Ashley Treatment”—Reconsidering Intellectual Disability explores important questions at the intersection of disability theory, Christian moral theology, and bioethics.
What are the biomedical boundaries of acceptable treatment for those not able to give informed consent? Who gets to decide when a patient cannot communicate their desires and needs? Should we accept the dominance of a form of medicine that identifies those with intellectual impairments as pathological objects in need of the normalizing bodily manipulations of technological medicine?
In a critical exploration of contemporary disability theory, Jason Reimer Greig contends that L'Arche, a federation of faith communities made up of people with and without intellectual disabilities, provides an alternative response to the predominant bioethical worldview that sees disability as a problem to be solved. Reconsidering Intellectual Disability shows how a focus on Christian theological tradition’s moral thinking and practice of friendship with God offers a way to free not only people with intellectual disabilities but all people from the objectifying gaze of modern medicine. L'Arche draws inspiration from Jesus's solidarity with the "least of these" and a commitment to Christian friendship that sees people with profound cognitive disabilities not as anomalous objects of pity but as fellow friends of God. This vital act of social recognition opens the way to understanding the disabled not as objects to be fixed but as teachers whose lives can transform others and open a new way of being human.
Polanyi’s method was not laid out in his published works, and his vocabulary tends to make his writings difficult to understand. By exposing the structure of his theory of tacit knowing, and by tracing the growth of his thinking, Jha shows how the various elements of his thought are integrated. Through examination of his philosophical roots in Kant and the complexity of his evolving thought, she counteracts the popular notion that Polanyi’s philosophy stands apart from the western philosophic tradition.
Jha’s deep analysis makes Polanyi’s shift of focus from science to philosophy more intelligible, his philosophy more approachable, and the causes he championed—such as the freedom of science and cultural freedom—more understandable. Applying his notion of tacit knowing in practical directions, Jha seeks to bring the study of Polanyi’s philosophy out of the specialists’ enclave and into such fields as ethics and clinical medicine.
Published in 1995, Mississippian Communities and Households, edited by J. Daniel Rogers and Bruce D. Smith, was a foundational text that advanced southeastern archaeology in significant ways and brought household-level archaeology to the forefront of the field. Reconsidering Mississippian Communitiesand Households revisits and builds on what has been learned in the years since the Rogers and Smith volume, advancing the field further with the diverse perspectives of current social theory and methods and big data as applied to communities in Native America from the AD 900s to 1700s and from northeast Florida to southwest Arkansas.
Watts Malouchos and Betzenhauser bring together scholars researching diverse Mississippian Southeast and Midwest sites to investigate aspects of community and household construction, maintenance, and dissolution. Thirteen original case studies prove that community can be enacted and expressed in various ways, including in feasting, pottery styles, war and conflict, and mortuary treatments.
Recently, scholars of Olmec visual culture have identified symbols for umbilical cords, bundles, and cave-wombs, as well as a significant number of women portrayed on monuments and as figurines. In this groundbreaking study, Carolyn Tate demonstrates that these subjects were part of a major emphasis on gestational imagery in Formative Period Mesoamerica. In Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture, she identifies the presence of women, human embryos, and fetuses in monuments and portable objects dating from 1400 to 400 BC and originating throughout much of Mesoamerica. This highly original study sheds new light on the prominent roles that women and gestational beings played in Early Formative societies, revealing female shamanic practices, the generative concepts that motivated caching and bundling, and the expression of feminine knowledge in the 260-day cycle and related divinatory and ritual activities.
Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture is the first study that situates the unique hollow babies of Formative Mesoamerica within the context of prominent females and the prevalent imagery of gestation and birth. It is also the first major art historical study of La Venta and the first to identify Mesoamerica's earliest creation narrative. It provides a more nuanced understanding of how later societies, including Teotihuacan and West Mexico, as well as the Maya, either rejected certain Formative Period visual forms, rituals, social roles, and concepts or adopted and transformed them into the enduring themes of Mesoamerican symbol systems.
McMahon shows how FDR's attempt to strengthen the presidency and undermine the power of conservative Southern Democrats dovetailed with his efforts to seek racial equality through the federal courts. By appointing a majority of rights-based liberals deferential to presidential power, Roosevelt ensured that the Supreme Court would be receptive to civil rights claims, especially when those claims had the support of the executive branch.
Challenging several longstanding notions about the American way of war, this book examines US strategic and operational practice from 1775 to 2014. It surveys all major US wars from the War of Independence to the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as most smaller US conflicts to determine what patterns, if any, existed in American uses of force. Contrary to many popular sentiments, Echevarria finds that the American way of war is not astrategic, apolitical, or defined by the use of overwhelming force. Instead, the American way of war was driven more by political considerations than military ones, and the amount of force employed was rarely overwhelming or decisive.
As a scholar of Clausewitz, Echevarria borrows explicitly from the Prussian to describe the American way of war not only as an extension of US policy by other means, but also the continuation of US politics by those means. The book’s focus on strategic and operational practice closes the gap between critiques of American strategic thinking and analyses of US campaigns. Echevarria discovers that most conceptions of American strategic culture fail to hold up to scrutiny, and that US operational practice has been closer to military science than to military art.
Providing a fresh look at how America’s leaders have used military force historically and what that may mean for the future, this book should be of interest to military practitioners and policymakers, students and scholars of military history and security studies, and general readers interested in military history and the future of military power.
The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Chavín de Huántar holds an iconic place in the archaeology of pre-Columbian Peru and is crucial to understanding the emergence of Andean civilization during the early first millennium BCE. Best known for its elaborate religious architecture and distinctive stone sculpture, Chavín de Huántar was the center of a much wider Andean world and the synchronicity of widespread socioeconomic changes coupled with intrusive Chavín material culture and iconography at distant centers suggests that Chavín de Huántar influenced a vast region through the expansion of religious ideology and intensified long-distance interaction.
Reconsidering the Chavín Phenomenon in the Twenty-First Century builds upon a surge of archaeological research over the last twenty years, bringing together the work of scholars researching Chavín de Huántar and its neighbors on the coast, highlands, and ceja de selva. This volume offers a cohesive vision of the Chavín Phenomenon at both the local and interregional level, one which recognizes the high degree of socioeconomic and cultural diversity that existed and the active role of centers outside the Chavín heartland in shaping the radical transformations that occurred within the Chavín Interaction Sphere between 1000 and 400 BCE.
Part 1 raises questions about the ideologies of consensus that are associated with naming threshold concepts of a discipline. Contributions challenge the idea of consensus and seek to expand both the threshold concepts framework and the concepts themselves. Part 2 focuses on threshold concepts in action and practice, demonstrating the innovative ways threshold concepts and a threshold concepts framework have been used in writing courses and programs. Part 3 shows how a threshold concepts framework can help us engage in conversations beyond writing studies.
(Re)Considering What We Know raises new questions and offers new ideas that can help to advance the discussion and use of threshold concepts in the field of writing studies. It will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students in writing studies, especially those who have previously engaged with Naming What We Know.
Contributors:
Marianne Ahokas, Jonathan Alexander, Chris M. Anson, Ian G. Anson, Sarah Ben-Zvi, Jami Blaauw-Hara, Mark Blaauw-Hara, Maggie Black, Dominic Borowiak, Chris Castillo, Chen Chen, Sandra Descourtis, Norbert Elliot, Heidi Estrem, Alison Farrell, Matthew Fogarty, Joanne Baird Giordano, James Hammond, Holly Hassel, Lauren Heap, Jennifer Heinert, Doug Hesse, Jonathan Isaac, Katie Kalish, Páraic Kerrigan, Ann Meejung Kim, Kassia Krzus-Shaw, Saul Lopez, Jennifer Helane Maher, Aishah Mahmood, Aimee Mapes, Kerry Marsden, Susan Miller-Cochran, Deborah Mutnick, Rebecca Nowacek, Sarah O’Brien, Ọlá Ọládipọ̀, Peggy O’Neill, Cassandra Phillips, Mya Poe, Patricia Ratanapraphart, Jacqueline Rhodes, Samitha Senanayake, Susan E. Shadle, Dawn Shepherd, Katherine Stein, Patrick Sullivan, Brenna Swift, Carrie Strand Tebeau, Matt Thul, Nikhil Tiwari, Lisa Tremain, Lisa Velarde, Kate Vieira, Gordon Blaine West, Anne-Marie Womack, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Xiaopei Yang, Madylan Yarc
The second half of the book turns from the rule of law to the issue of property, specifically the Lockean version of the self that tied identity to legal conceptions of property and economic value. In separate discussions of Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser, Reconstituting Authority reveals authors as closely engaged with those changing perspectives on property and identity, in ways that challenged the racial, gendered, and economic consequences of America's possessive individualism.
Reconstituting the American Renaissance describes how Emerson and Whitman came into the period of their greatest productivity with different conceptions of the functions and political efficacy of the word in the world. It challenges Emerson’s position as Whitman’s necessary precursor and offers a cultural history that emphasizes the two writers’ differences in social class, cultural experience, and political perspective. In their writings between 1830 and 1855, the book finds contrasting conceptions of the relations between the “representative man” and the constituencies to whom, and for whom, he speaks. Reconstituting the American Renaissance opens up the canonical relationship between Emerson and Whitman and multiplies the historical and discursive contexts for understanding their published and unpublished works.
Contributors:
Juan Bruce-Novoa
Ramón Gutiérrez
María Herrera-Sobek
Enrique Lamadrid
Luis Leal
Francisco A. Lomelí
Genaro Padilla
Tey Diana Rebolledo
Tino Villanueva
One of the leading historians of education in the United States here develops a powerful interpretation of the uses of history in educational reform and of the relations among democracy, education, and the capitalist state. Michael Katz discusses the reshaping of American education from three perspectives. First is the perspective of history: How did American education take shape? The second is that of reform: What can a historian say about recent criticisms and proposals for improvement? The third is that of historiography: What drives the politics of educational history? Katz shows how the reconstruction of America’s educational past can be used as a framework for thinking about current reform. Contemporary concepts such as public education, institutional structures such as the multiversity, and modern organizational forms such as bureaucracy all originated as solutions to problems of public policy. The petrifaction of these historical products—which are neither inevitable nor immutable—has become, Katz maintains, one of the mighty obstacles to change.
The book’s central questions are as much ethical and political as they are practical. How do we assess the relative importance of efficiency and responsiveness in educational institutions? Whom do we really want institutions to serve? Are we prepared to alter institutions and policies that contradict fundamental political principles? Why have some reform strategies consistently failed? On what models should institutions be based? Should schools and universities be further assimilated to the marketplace and the state? Katz’s iconoclastic treatment of these issues, vividly and clearly written, will be of interest to both specialists and general readers. Like his earlier classic, The Irony of Early School Reform (1968), this book will set a fresh agenda for debate in the field.
The collapse of classic Maya civilization at the end of the eighth century A.D. is still an enigma, but the story behind it is likely more than a clash of warring city-states. New research indicates that ecological degradation and nutritional deficiency may be as important to our understanding of Maya cultural processes as deciphering the rise and fall of kings.
Reconstructing Ancient Maya Diet integrates recent data from bone-chemistry research, paleopathology, paleobotany, zooarchaeology, and ethnobotany to show what the ancient Maya actually ate at various periods (as opposed to archaeological suppositions) and how it affected the quality of their lives. It is now evident that to feed a burgeoning population the Maya relied on increasingly intensive forms of agriculture.
Exploring the relationship between these practices, ecological degradation, and social collapse, this book uses dietary data to investigate the rise of agricultural systems and class structure; the characterization of social relationships along lines of gender and age (i.e., who ate what); and the later effects of the Spanish conquest on diet and extant modes of agriculture.
Maya subsistence has been investigated intensively for the past two decades, but this is the first volume that unites work across the spectrum of Maya bioarchaeology.
Reconstructing Architecture was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
To create architecture is an inherently political act, yet its nature as a social practice is often obscured beneath layers of wealth and privilege. The contributors to this volume question architecture's complicity with the status quo, moving beyond critique to outline the part architects are playing in building radical social movements and challenging dominant forms of power.
The making of architecture is instrumental in the construction of our identities, our differences, the world around us-much of what we know of institutions, the distribution of power, social relations, and cultural values is mediated by the built environment. Historically, architecture has constructed the environments that house the dominant culture. Yet, as the essays in Reconstructing Architecture demonstrate, there exists a strong tradition of critical practice in the field, one that attempts to alter existing social power relations. Engaging the gap between modernism and postmodernism, each chapter addresses an oppositional discourse that has developed within the field and then reconstructs it in terms of a new social project: feminism, social theory, environmentalism, cultural studies, race and ethnic studies, and critical theory.
The activists and scholars writing here provide a clarion call to architects and other producers of culture, challenging them to renegotiate their political allegiances and to help reconstruct a viable democratic life in the face of inexorable forces driving economic growth, destroying global ecology, homogenizing culture, and privatizing the public realm. Reconstructing Architecture reformulates the role of architecture in society as well as its capacity to further a progressive social transformation.
Contributors: Sherry Ahrentzen, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Bradford C. Grant, California Polytechnic State U, San Luis Obispo; Richard Ingersoll, Rice U; Margaret Soltan, George Washington U; Anthony Ward, U of Auckland, New Zealand.
Thomas A. Dutton is an architect and professor of architecture at Miami University, Ohio. He is editor of Voices in Architectural Education (1991) and is associate editor of the Journal of Architectural Education.
Lian Hurst Mann is an architect and editor of Architecture California. A founding member of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, she is editor of its bilingual quarterly Ahora Now and a coauthor of Reconstructing Los Angeles from the Bottom Up (1993).
Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse analyzes argumentation in ordinary disputes. The analysis begins with an ideal model: a theoretical structure of discourse that might be used to resolve a dispute about the merits of two opposing cases. The ideal model does not describe actual argumentative practice. Argumentative discourse does not always seek genuine resolution and, when it does, the participants may not perform as ideal arguers.
Once the cosmopolitan center of the Middle East, Beirut was devastated by the civil war that ran from 1975 to 1991, which dislocated many residents, disrupted normal municipal functions, and destroyed the vibrant downtown district. The aftermath of the war was an unstable situation Sawalha considers "a postwar state of emergency," even as the state strove to restore normalcy. This ethnography centers on various groups' responses to Beirut's large, privatized urban-renewal project that unfolded during this turbulent moment.
At the core of the study is the theme of remembering space. The official process of rebuilding the city as a node in the global economy collided with local day-to-day concerns, and all arguments invariably inspired narratives of what happened before and during the war. Sawalha explains how Beirutis invoked their past experiences of specific sites to vie for the power to shape those sites in the future. Rather than focus on a single site, the ethnography crosses multiple urban sites and social groups, to survey varied groups with interests in particular spaces. The book contextualizes these spatial conflicts within the discourses of the city's historical accounts and the much-debated concept of heritage, voiced in academic writing, politics, and journalism. In the afterword, Sawalha links these conflicts to the social and political crises of early twenty-first-century Beirut.
In the 1990s, influenced by the deconstructionist movement in literary theory and trends toward revisionist history, a cadre of academics and historians led by William Cronon began raising provocative questions about ideas of wilderness and the commitments and strategies of the contemporary environmental movement. While these critiques challenged some cherished and widely held beliefs -- and raised the hackles of many in the environmental community -- they also stimulated an important and potentially transformative debate about the conceptual foundations of environmentalism.
Reconstructing Conservation makes a vital contribution to that debate, bringing together 23 leading scholars and practitioners -- including J. Baird Callicott, Susan Flader, Richard Judd, Curt Meine, Bryan Norton, and Paul B. Thompson -- to examine the classical conservation tradition and its value to contemporary environmentalism. Focusing not just on the tensions that have marked the deconstructivist debate over wilderness and environmentalism, the book represents a larger and ultimately more constructive and hopeful discussion over the proper course of future conservation scholarship and action.
Essays provide a fresh look at conservation icons such as George Perkins Marsh and Aldo Leopold, as well as the contributions of lesser-known figures including Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and Scott Nearing. Represented are a wealth of diverse perspectives, addressing such topics as wilderness and protected areas, cultural landscapes, rural/agrarian landscapes, urban/built environments, and multiple points on the geographic map. Contributors offer enthusiastic endorsements of pluralism in conservation values and goals along with cautionary tales about the dangers of fragmentation and atomism. The final chapter brings together the major insights, arguments, and proposals contained in the individual contributions, synthesizing them into a dozen broad-ranging principles designed to guide the study and practice of conservation.
Reconstructing Conservation assesses the meaning and relevance of our conservation inheritance in the 21st century, and represents a conceptually integrated vision for reconsidering conservation thought and practice to meet the needs and circumstances of a new, post-deconstructivist era.
Every legal system must decide how to distinguish between agreements that are enforceable and those that are not. Formal bargains in the marketplace and casual promises in a social setting mark the two extremes, but many hard cases lie between. When gaps are left in a contract, how should courts fill them? What does it mean to say that an agreement is legally enforceable? If someone breaks a legally enforceable contract, what consequences follow?
For 150 years, legal scholars have debated whether a set of coherent principles provide answers to such basic questions. Oliver Wendell Holmes put forward the affirmative case, arguing that bargained-for consideration, expectation damages, and a handful of related ideas captured the essence of contract law. The work of the next several generations, culminating in Grant Gilmore’s The Death of Contract in 1974, took a contrary view. The coherence Holmes had tried to bring to the field was illusory. It was more sensible to see contracts as merely a species of civil obligation and resist the temptation to impose rigid and artificial rules.
In Reconstructing Contracts, Douglas Baird takes stock of the current state of contract doctrine and in the process reinvigorates the classic framework of Anglo-American contract law. He shows that Holmes’s principles are fundamentally sound. Even if they lack that talismanic quality formerly ascribed to them, properly understood they continue to provide the best guide to contracts for a new generation of students, practitioners, and judges.
“An urgent manifesto for the reconstruction of democratic belonging in our troubled times.”
—Davide Panagia
Across the world, democracies are suffering from a disconnect between the people and political elites. In communities where jobs and industry are scarce, many feel the government is incapable of understanding their needs or addressing their problems. The resulting frustration has fueled the success of destabilizing demagogues. To reverse this pattern and restore responsible government, we need to reinvigorate democracy at the local level. But what does that mean? Drawing on examples of successful community building in cities large and small, from a shrinking village in rural Austria to a neglected section of San Diego, Reconstructing Democracy makes a powerful case for re-engaging citizens. It highlights innovative grassroots projects and shows how local activists can form alliances and discover their own power to solve problems.
Illuminating crucial connections between understandings of race, gender, and place on the one hand and narrative and images on the other, McPherson reads a number of representations of the South produced from the 1930s to the present. These are drawn from fiction, film, television, southern studies scholarship, popular journalism, music, tourist sites, the internet, and autobiography. She examines modes of affect or ways of "feeling southern" to reveal how these feelings, along with the narratives and images she discusses, sanction particular racial logics. A wide-ranging cultural studies critique, Reconstructing Dixie calls for vibrant new ways of thinking about the South and for a revamped and reinvigorated southern studies.
Reconstructing Dixie will appeal to scholars in American, southern, and cultural studies, and to those in African American, media, and women’s studies.
The Earth's biological, chemical, and physical systems are increasingly shaped by the activities of one species-ours. In our decisions about everything from manufacturing technologies to restaurant menus, the health of the planet has become a product of human choice. Environmentalism, however, has largely failed to adapt to this new reality.
Reconstructing Earth offers seven essays that explore ways of developing a new, more sophisticated approach to the environment that replaces the fantasy of recovering pristine landscapes with a more grounded viewpoint that can foster a better relationship between humans and the planet. Braden Allenby, a lawyer with degrees in both engineering and environmental studies, explains the importance of technological choice, and how that factor is far more significant in shaping our environment (in ways both desirable and not) than environmental controls. Drawing on his varied background and experience in both academia and the corporate world, he describes the emerging field of "earth systems engineering and management," which offers an integrated approach to understanding and managing complex human/natural systems that can serve as a basis for crafting better, more lasting solutions to widespread environmental problems.
Reconstructing Earth not only critiques dysfunctional elements of current environmentalism but establishes a foundation for future environmental management and progress, one built on an understanding of technological evolution and the cultural systems that support modern technologies. Taken together, the essays offer an important means of developing an environmentalism that is robust and realistic enough to address the urgent realities of our planet.
Reconstructing Earth is a thought-provoking new work for anyone concerned with the past or future of environmental thought, including students and teachers of environmental studies, environmental policy, technology policy, technological evolution, or sustainability.
This is the story of how the economists, bankers, and politicians of Britain, France, and the United States approached the financial crisis of 1918–1923 after the most devastating of wars. It captures the emotional demands for rapid recovery and reconstruction of Europe as well as the machinations of countries already jousting for economic advantage in peace. It’s also a timely book because the West today faces similar problems with little more in the way of theory or tools for repair than after World War I, and with an evident loss of historical memory.
Dan Silverman places the reparations issue in proper perspective as only one of many complex problems. He demonstrates that the war produced a crisis in financial and monetary theory as well as in fact. Theory proved inadequate to the requirements of balancing budgets, liquidating massive debts, halting inflation, and stabilizing foreign exchange. In fact, the English and Americans imposed their economic orthodoxy on their less fortunate French ally and their former German adversary.
One of the more remarkable results of Silverman’s research is the reversal of the old view that France responded to its allies’ economic demands with intransigence, ignorance, and incompetence. Instead, Silverman depicts France as legitimately pursuing its own national self-interest, fighting Anglo-American hegemony, and defending itself as a debtor nation against the creditors who were its “allies.”
Franklin Strier brings this critical look at trial reform up to date with a new preface in which he discusses how the inordinate amount of public attention of the O. J. Simpson trial, and the power the attorneys had over the court in that case, shed new light on the trial system's weaknesses and inequities.
"Anyone with an interest in courtroom trials will be fascinated by Strier's analysis of the game of law and suggestions for reforming the trail system to provide justice in a greater number of cases. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice
Macroeconomics is in disarray. No one approach is dominant, and an increasing divide between theory and empirics is evident.
This book presents both a critique of mainstream macroeconomics from a structuralist perspective and an exposition of modern structuralist approaches. The fundamental assumption of structuralism is that it is impossible to understand a macroeconomy without understanding its major institutions and distributive relationships across productive sectors and social groups.
Lance Taylor focuses his critique on mainstream monetarist, new classical, new Keynesian, and growth models. He examines them from a historical perspective, tracing monetarism from its eighteenth-century roots and comparing current monetarist and new classical models with those of the post-Wicksellian, pre-Keynesian generation of macroeconomists. He contrasts the new Keynesian vision with Keynes's General Theory, and analyzes contemporary growth theories against long traditions of thought about economic development and structural change.
Reevaluating the method of scientific investigation, James A. Bell provides a bold philosophical framework for developing and assessing archaeologists' theories of the past. More informed and judicious decisions, the author asserts, are made when archaeologists explore questions such as:
•How can theories be formulated so that they increase understanding and provide insight, and are theories still useful when they do not?
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How can theories be adjusted when anomalies are revealed?
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How can theories be assessed against competing theories?
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When should theories be abandoned, and when should they be pursued further?
With numerous examples from archaeology as well as comparative examples from the physical and biological sciences, Bell illustrates how exploring the answers to these and related inquiries will lead to improved formulation and testing of theories.
Can a liberal polity act on pressing matters of public concern in a way that respects the variety of beliefs and commitments that its citizens hold? Recent efforts to answer this question typically begin by seeking an uncontroversial starting point from which legitimate public ends can be said to follow. This reluctance to admit controversial beliefs as legitimate grounds for public action threatens to prevent us from responding effectively to many of the leading social and political challenges that we face.
Eric MacGilvray argues that we should shift our attention away from the problem of identifying uncontroversial public ends in the present and toward the problem of evaluating potentially controversial public ends through collective inquiry over time. Rather than ask ourselves which public ends are justified, we must instead decide which public ends we should seek to justify.
Reconstructing Public Reason offers a fundamental rethinking of the nature and aims of liberal toleration, and of the political implications of pragmatic philosophy. It also provides fresh interpretations of founding pragmatic thinkers such as John Dewey and William James, and of leading contemporary figures such as John Rawls and Richard Rorty.
Delving into the circumstances, assumptions, and rhetoric that shaped the “official” story of Reconstruction, Brandwein describes precisely how a dominant interpretation of events ultimately emerged and what its implications have been for twentieth-century judicial decisions, particularly for Supreme Court rulings on civil rights. While analyzing interpretive disputes about slavery, Brandwein offers a detailed rescoring of post–Civil War legislative and constitutional history, including analysis of the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment. She identifies the perspectives on Reconstruction that were endorsed or rejected by the Supreme Court. Explaining what it meant—theoretically and practically—to resolve Reconstruction debates with a particular definition of slavery, Brandwein recounts how the Northern Democratic definition of “ending” slavery was not the only definition, just the one that prevailed. Using a familiar historical moment to do new interpretive work, she outlines a sociology of constitutional law, showing how subjective narrative construction can solidify into opaque institutional memory.
Presenting the results of a national study of teacher and peer response and student self-assessment at institutions of higher education across the United States, Melzer analyzes teacher and peer response to over 1,000 pieces of student writing as well as 128 student portfolio reflection essays. He draws on his analysis and on a comprehensive review of the literature on response to introduce a constructivist heuristic for response aimed at both composition instructors and instructors across disciplines. Melzer argues that teachers and researchers should focus less on teacher response to individual pieces of student writing and more on engaging in dialogue with student self-assessment and peer response, focusing on growth and transfer rather than products and grades.
Reconstructing Response to Student Writing, especially when taken together with Melzer’s previous book Assignments across the Curriculum, provides a comprehensive and large-scale view of college writing and responding across the curriculum in the United States.
Scholars from disciplines as diverse as political science and art history have offered widely differing interpretations of Kuhn's ideas, appropriating his notions of paradigm shifts and revolutions to fit their own theories, however imperfectly. Hoyningen-Huene does not merely offer another interpretation—he brings Kuhn's work into focus with rigorous philosophical analysis. Through extended discussions with Kuhn and an encyclopedic reading of his work, Hoyningen-Huene looks at the problems and justifications of his claims and determines how his theories might be expanded. Most significantly, he discovers that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be understood only with reference to the historiographic foundation of Kuhn's philosophy.
Discussing the concepts of paradigms, paradigm shifts, normal science, and scientific revolutions, Hoyningen-Huene traces their evolution to Kuhn's experience as a historian of contemporary science. From here, Hoyningen-Huene examines Kuhn's well-known thesis that scientists on opposite sides of a revolutionary divide "work in different worlds," explaining Kuhn's notion of a world-change during a scientific revolution. He even considers Kuhn's most controversial claims—his attack on the distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification and his notion of incommensurability—addressing both criticisms and defenses of these ideas.
Destined to become the authoritative philosophical study of Kuhn's work, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions both enriches our understanding of Kuhn and provides powerful interpretive tools for bridging Continental and Anglo-American philosophical traditions.
The deficiencies Elkin points out provide the starting point for his own constitutional theory of the republic—a theory that, unlike Madison’s, lays out a substantive conception of the public interest that emphasizes the power of institutions to shape our political, economic, and civic lives. Elkin argues that his theory should guide us toward building a commercial republic that is rooted in a politics of the public interest and the self-interest of the middle class. He then recommends specific reforms to create this kind of republic, asserting that Americans today can still have the lives a commercial republic is intended to promote: lives with real opportunities for economic prosperity, republican political self-government, and individual liberty.
With Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy, Eric Lomazoff offers a far more robust account of the constitutional politics of national banking between 1791 and 1832. During that time, three forces—changes within the Bank itself, growing tension over federal power within the Republican coalition, and the endurance of monetary turmoil beyond the War of 1812 —drove the development of our first major debate over the scope of federal power at least as much as the formal dimensions of the Constitution or the absence of a shared legal definition for the word “necessary.” These three forces—sometimes alone, sometimes in combination—repeatedly reshaped the terms on which the Bank’s constitutionality was contested. Lomazoff documents how these three dimensions of the polity changed over time and traces the manner in which they periodically led federal officials to adjust their claims about the Bank’s constitutionality. This includes the emergence of the Coinage Clause—which gives Congress power to “coin money, regulate the value thereof”—as a novel justification for the institution. He concludes the book by explaining why a more robust account of the national bank controversy can help us understand the constitutional basis for modern American monetary politics.
The aim of this book is to offer a fresh approach to the history and archaeology of the Cyclades in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Early Middle Ages in light of current archaeological investigations. It is an attempt to interpret human-environmental interaction in order to read the relationship between islands, settlements, landscapes, and seascapes in the context of the diverse and highly interactive Mediterranean world.
It offers an interdisciplinary approach, which combines archaeological evidence, literary sources, and observations of the sites and microlandscapes as a whole, using the advantages offered by the application of new technologies in archaeological research (Geographic Information Systems). The islands of Paros and Naxos are used as case-studies. The author traces how these neighboring insular communities reacted under the same general circumstances pertaining in the Aegean and to what extent the landscape played a role in this process.
Reconstruction after the Civil War explores the role of former slaves during this period in American history. Looking past popular myths and controversial scholarship, John Hope Franklin uses his astute insight and careful research to provide an accurate, comprehensive portrait of the era. His arguments concerning the brevity of the North’s occupation, the limited power wielded by former slaves, the influence of moderate southerners, the flawed constitutions of the radical state governments, and the downfall of Reconstruction remain compelling today. This new edition of Reconstruction after the Civil War also includes a foreword by Eric Foner and a perceptive essay by Michael W. Fitzgerald.
Volume I outlines a broad historical context for the Reconstruction Amendments and contains materials related to the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, while Volume 2 covers the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments on the rights of citizenship and enfranchisement. The documents in this collection encompass a sweeping range of primary sources, from congressional debates to court cases, public speeches to newspaper articles. As a whole, the volumes meticulously depict a significant period of legal change even as they illuminate the ways in which people across the land grappled with the process of constitutional reconstruction. Filling a major gap in the literature on the era, The Reconstruction Amendments will be indispensable for readers in politics, history, and law, as well as anyone seeking a better understanding of the post–Civil War basis of American constitutional democracy.
Volume I outlines a broad historical context for the Reconstruction Amendments along with materials related to the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, while Volume II covers the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments on the rights of citizenship and enfranchisement. The documents in this collection encompass a sweeping range of primary sources, from congressional talks to court cases, public speeches to newspaper articles. As a whole, the volumes meticulously depict a significant period of legal change even as they illuminate the ways in which people across the land grappled with the process of constitutional reconstruction. Filling a major gap in the literature on the era, The Reconstruction Amendments will be indispensable for readers in politics, history, and law, as well as anyone seeking a better understanding of the post–Civil War basis of American constitutional democracy.
In the decade that followed the Civil War, two questions dominated political debate: To what degree were African Americans now “equal” to white Americans, and how should this equality be implemented in law? Although Republicans entertained multiple, even contradictory, answers to these questions, the party committed itself to several civil rights initiatives. When Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment, it justified these decisions with a broad egalitarian rhetoric. This rhetoric altered congressional culture, instituting new norms that made equality not merely an ideal,but rather a pragmatic aim for political judgments.
Kirt Wilson examines Reconstruction’s desegregation debate to explain how it represented an important movement in the evolution of U.S. race relations. He outlines how Congress fought to control the scope of black civil rights by contesting the definition of black equality, and the expediency and constitutionality of desegregation. Wilson explores how the debate over desegregation altered public memory about slavery and the Civil War, while simultaneously shaping a political culture that established the trajectory of race relations into the next century.
A reprint of the 1910 study, Reconstruction in Texas examines the events that still impact upon Texas and the South.
"In The Reconstruction of Patriotism, Morris Janowitz . . . places a national-service program on the national agenda. . . . Like William James, Janowitz envisions government enrolling young people to work for a year or two at subsistence pay, doing jobs that benefit society—working with, say, 'conservation, health, or old-age problems.' He believes that we need a service program because since the end of the Second World War our citizens (and, indeed, citizens of almost all the advanced industrial nations) have become more keenly aware of their rights than of their obligations, and generations are growing up with little or no understanding that they are members of a national community and have responsibilities to it—that they must give as well as take. . . . Because it reopens discussion of our wider obligations and how to fulfill them, Mr. Janowitz's thoughtful book is in itself a national service."—Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker
"Morris Janowitz examines an issue that seldom is subject to social and political analysis—patriotism. His thesis is clear: The long-term trend in politics has been to enhance citizen rights without effective articulation of citizen obligations. A meaningful balance between the two, he contends, must be restored. . . . The strength of this study lies in Janowitz's persuasive argument that the durability and vitality of democratic institutions require that a sense of community, or shared values, be preserved. Without civiz consciousness, he rightly observes, social and political fragmentation ensues. . . . A lucid and impressively researched polemic."—W. Wesley McDonald, American Political Science Review
"Janowitz addresses a seminal issue: how to restore the sense of shared civic responsibility that has fallen victim in recent years to our growing preoccupation with individual rights and the rise of special-interest groups. . . . Central to his prescription is the revival of the concept of the citizen soldier, whose importance since pre-Revolutionary War days Janoqitz discusses at length. He concludes, 'There can be no reconstruction of patriotism without a system of national service.' . . . An important book. I highly recommend it."—Washington Monthly
Recounts in detail the volatile political period in Alabama following the end of the Civil War
Following the end of the Civil War, white Southerners were forced to concede equal rights to those who had been enslaved, ushering in a new and ruthless brand of politics. Suddenly, the status and place of some four million former slaves dominated the national and regional political dialogue. In Alabama, the Republican Party established itself quickly and powerfully with the participation of a newly freed constituency, firmly aligned against the Democratic Party that had long dictated the governance of the state. Well-heeled planters, merchants, and bankers, joined by yeoman farmers, staged a counterrevolution by gravitating strongly to the Democratic Party and its unabashedly white supremacist measures. The ensuing power struggle in the birthplace of the Confederacy is at the heart of Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874.
What emerges in William Warren Rogers Jr.’s comprehensive study of the era is a detailed examination of Reconstruction politics, particularly in Alabama. This book explores an explosive and unpredictable political environment that a few years earlier would have been inconceivable. A vivid picture emerges of courthouse rallies and bitter infighting in legislative circles. Rogers’s narrative ventures into darker places as well: to the Tennessee Valley and the Black Belt regions of Alabama, where Klan nightriders used violence against an enemy and ideology they could not abide.
The attempt to capture and account for the unforgiving political landscape created by the extraordinary circumstances of Reconstruction constitutes this study’s most central contribution. Rogers often quotes black and white citizens, Democrats and Republicans. Drawn from newspapers, correspondence, and various federal investigations, these firsthand voices are passionate, unvarnished, and filled with conviction. They offer a startling immediacy and illustrate the temper—or distemper—of the times. Readers are treated to a panoramic unveiling of Reconstruction Alabama politics that provides a sense of what was truly at stake: the values by which a region and the nation as a whole would chart its future for the century to come.
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Through an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach to recording industry history, Record Cultures creates new connections between different strands of media research. It will be of interest to scholars of popular music, media studies, sound studies, American culture, and the history of film, television, and radio.
Large numbers of Civil War veterans remembered and reminisced about their war experiences, but only a relative few dedicated the rest of their lives to the task of commemorating their long-ago deeds. John S. Kountz was one of this latter group. Kountz joined the Thirty-seventh Ohio Infantry in September 1861 as a fifteen-year-old drummer boy and later, under General William T. Sherman, endured the long siege at Vicksburg before helping to win control of the city in July 1863. In 1899 the War Department appointed Kountz as the official historian at the newly designated Vicksburg National Military Park. As part of his duties, he produced two major works, an organizational chronicle of the armies that fought at Vicksburg and an unpublished narrative of the campaign and siege. This welcome volume presents both of these extremely rare documents together for the first time, providing a valuable resource for a new generation of scholars and enthusiasts.
Record of the Organizations Engaged in the Campaign, Siege, and Defense of Vicksburg was published in a limited edition by the Government Printing Office in 1901 and offered visitors and historians a detailed examination of the various commands that fought at Vicksburg. The record has long been an essential but hard-to-find source for historians. Kountz’s impressive 116-page campaign overview is rarer still. Because of turnover at the park and Kountz’s death in 1909, the manuscript never saw publication and has, until now, lain buried in the archives at Vicksburg. Offering an unbiased account of both sides of the battle, it delves into the minds of the commanders, examines their decision-making processes, and articulates several opinions that have sparked debate ever since.
With a new introduction by noted historian Timothy B. Smith, this significant work makes widely available an important history by a participant in the action and opens a fascinating window into the history of Civil War scholarship.
Based on work the author has carried out with survivor groups in Northern Ireland and South Africa, Recording Memories from Political Violence draws on written and audiovisual texts to describe and analyze the use of documentary filmmaking in recording experiences of political conflict. A variety of issues relevant to the genre are addressed at length, including the importance of ethics in the collaboration between the filmmaker and the participant and the effect of location on the accounts of participants. Cahal McLaughlin draws on the diverse fields of film and cultural studies, as well as nearly twenty years of production experience, in this informed and instructive contribution to documentary filmmaking and post-conflict studies.
Cowie claims that, as a radical film form, documentary has been a way for filmmakers to acknowledge historical and contemporary realities by presenting images of these realities. If documentary is the desire to know reality through its images and sounds, she asks, what kind of speaking (and speaking about) emerges in documentary, and how are we engaged by it? In considering this and other questions, Cowie examines a range of noteworthy films, including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, John Huston’s Let There Be Light, and Milica Tomic’s Portrait of My Mother.
Recording Reality, Desiring the Real stakes documentary’s central place in cinema as both an art form and a form of social engagement, which together create a new understanding of spectatorship.
Papyrological analysis of Aristophanes’ documents, within the context of the textual record of the village, shows a new and divergent scribal practice that reflects broader trends among his contemporaries: Aristophanes was part of a larger, national system of administrative changes, enacted by the country’s Arab rulers in order to better control administrative practices and fiscal policies within the country. Yet Aristophanes’ dossier shows him not just as an administrator, revealing details about his life, his role in the community, and the elite networks within which he operated. This unique perspective provides new insights into both the micro-history of an individual’s experience of eighth-century Theban village life, and its reflection in the macro social, economic, and political trends in Egypt at this time.
This book will prove valuable to scholars of late antique studies, papyrology, philology, early Islamic history, social and economic history, and Egyptology.
In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.
In the years leading to the birth of Israel, Zerubavel shows, Zionist settlers in Palestine consciously sought to rewrite Jewish history by reshaping Jewish memory. Zerubavel focuses on the nationalist reinterpretation of the defense of Masada against the Romans in 73 C.E. and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 133-135; and on the transformation of the 1920 defense of a new Jewish settlement in Tel Hai into a national myth. Zerubavel demonstrates how, in each case, Israeli memory transforms events that ended in death and defeat into heroic myths and symbols of national revival.
Drawing on a broad range of official and popular sources and original interviews, Zerubavel shows that the construction of a new national tradition is not necessarily the product of government policy but a creative collaboration between politicans, writers, and educators. Her discussion of the politics of commemoration demonstrates how rival groups can turn the past into an arena of conflict as they posit competing interpretations of history and opposing moral claims on the use of the past. Zerubavel analyzes the emergence of counter-memories within the reality of Israel's frequent wars, the ensuing debates about the future of the occupied territories, and the embattled relations with Palestinians.
A fascinating examination of the interplay between history and memory, this book will appeal to historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and folklorists, as well as to scholars of cultural studies, literature, and communication.
Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United States—such works as Juliet Wittman’s Breast Cancer Journal, John Hockenberry’s Moving Violations, Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, and Lou Ann Walker’s A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family—Couser addresses questions of both poetics and politics. He examines why and under what circumstances individuals choose to write about illness or disability; what role plot plays in such narratives; how and whether closure is achieved; who assumes the prerogative of narration; which conditions are most often represented; and which literary conventions lend themselves to representing particular conditions. By tracing the development of new subgenres of personal narrative in our time, this book explores how explicit consideration of illness and disability has enriched the repertoire of life writing. In addition, Couser’s discussion of medical discourse joins the current debate about whether the biomedical model is entirely conducive to humane care for ill and disabled people.
With its sympathetic critique of the testimony of those most affected by these conditions, Recovering Bodies contributes to an understanding of the relations among bodily dysfunction, cultural conventions, and identity in contemporary America.
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book, 2002
The history of Mexican Americans is a history of the intermingling of races—Indian, White, and Black. This racial history underlies a legacy of racial discrimination against Mexican Americans and their Mexican ancestors that stretches from the Spanish conquest to current battles over ending affirmative action and other assistance programs for ethnic minorities. Asserting the centrality of race in Mexican American history, Martha Menchaca here offers the first interpretive racial history of Mexican Americans, focusing on racial foundations and race relations from prehispanic times to the present.
Menchaca uses the concept of racialization to describe the process through which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. authorities constructed racial status hierarchies that marginalized Mexicans of color and restricted their rights of land ownership. She traces this process from the Spanish colonial period and the introduction of slavery through racial laws affecting Mexican Americans into the late twentieth-century. This re-viewing of familiar history through the lens of race recovers Blacks as important historical actors, links Indians and the mission system in the Southwest to the Mexican American present, and reveals the legal and illegal means by which Mexican Americans lost their land grants.
A lethal mix of natural disaster, dangerously flawed construction, and reckless human actions devastated San Francisco in 1906 and New Orleans in 2005. Eighty percent of the built environments of both cities were destroyed in the catastrophes, and the poor, the elderly, and the medically infirm were disproportionately among the thousands who perished. These striking similarities in the impacts of cataclysms separated by a century impelled Steve Kroll-Smith to look for commonalities in how the cities recovered from disaster. In Recovering Inequality, he builds a convincing case that disaster recovery and the reestablishment of social and economic inequality are inseparable.
Kroll-Smith demonstrates that disaster and recovery in New Orleans and San Francisco followed a similar pattern. In the immediate aftermath of the flooding and the firestorm, social boundaries were disordered and the communities came together in expressions of unity and support. But these were quickly replaced by other narratives and actions, including the depiction of the poor as looters, uneven access to disaster assistance, and successful efforts by the powerful to take valuable urban real estate from vulnerable people. Kroll-Smith concludes that inexorable market forces ensured that recovery efforts in both cities would reestablish the patterns of inequality that existed before the catastrophes. The major difference he finds between the cities is that, from a market standpoint, New Orleans was expendable, while San Francisco rose from the ashes because it was a hub of commerce.
Women have been thoughtful readers and interpreters of scripture throughout the ages, yet the usual history of biblical interpretation includes few women’s voices. To introduce readers to this untapped source for the history of biblical interpretation, this volume presents forgotten works from the nineteenth century written by women—including Grace Aguilar, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others—from various faith backgrounds, countries, and social classes engaging contemporary biblical scholarship. Due to their exclusion from the academy, women’s interpretive writings addressed primarily a nonscholarly audience and were written in a variety of genres: novels and poetry, catechisms, manuals for Bible study, and commentaries on the books of the Bible. To recover these nineteenth-century women interpreters of the Bible, each essay in this volume locates a female author in her historical, ecclesiastical, and interpretive context, focusing on particular biblical passages to clarify an author’s contributions as well as to explore how her reading of the text was shaped by her experience as a woman.
Both Scruton and Manent have repudiated the fashionable nihilism associated with the “thought of 1968” and the “Parisian nonsense machine,” and have shown that gratitude is the proper response of the human person to the “givenness of things.” Both defend the self-governing nation against reckless nationalism and the even more reckless temptation of supranational governance and post-political democracy, what Manent suggestively calls a “kratos” without a “demos.” Both defend the secular state while taking aim at a radical secularism that rejects “the Christian mark” that is at the heart of our inheritance and that sustains the rich and necessary interpenetration of truth and liberty. Scruton’s more “cultural” perspective is indebted to Burke and Kant; Manent’s more political perspective draws on Aristotle, St. Thomas, Tocqueville, and Raymond Aron, among others. By highlighting their affinities, and reflecting on their instructive differences, Mahoney shows how, together, the English man of letters Scruton, and the French political philosopher Manent, guide us to the recovery of a horizon of thought and action animated by practical reason and the wellsprings of the human soul. They show us the humanizing path forward, but first we must make the necessary spiritual decision to repudiate repudiation once and for all.
“With sophisticated and profound scholarship, Daniel Mahoney deploys his elegant style to defend the soul of civilization. Through the writings of Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton, he charts a course through the political and philosophical turmoil of the present age, providing hope and light amid the prevailing darkness.”
— Mark Dooley, Irish philosopher, writer and journalist. Author of Conversations with Roger Scruton and Sir Roger's literary executor.
“Mahoney's collection of essays does a marvelous job of contextualizing and explaining the vital work of these two philosophers. He's also an engaging and elegant writer.”
— Daniel DiSalvo, City Journal
“A series of reflective essays by Mahoney on the philosophical, theological, and political thinking of our best conservative theorists: Pierre Manent and the late Roger
Scruton. Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul expresses well what we need.” — Richard M. Reinsch II, National Review
Is the language of rights enough to foster real social and political change? Nivedita Menon explores the relationship between law and feminist politics by examining the contemporary Indian women's movement with comparisons to France and the United States. She argues that the intersection of feminist politics, law, and the state often paradoxically and severely distorts important ethical and emancipatory impulses of feminism.
Menon reviews historical challenges to the liberal notion of rights from Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and critical legal scholars, and analyzes current Indian debates on topics including abortion, sexual violence, and Parliamentary quotas for women. Far from being a call to withdraw from the arena of law, Recovering Subversion instead urges feminists everywhere to recognize the limits of "rights discourse" and pleads for a politics that goes beyond its boundaries.
Despite the recent flood of scholarly work investigating the interrelated issues of race, gender, and representation, little has been written about black women’s depictions of their own bodies. Both past and present-day American cultural discourse has attempted either to hypereroticize the black female body or make it a site of impropriety and crime.
The essays in this volume focus on how African American women, from the nineteenth century to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of others. Contributors attempt to “recover” the black female body in two ways: they explore how dominant historical images have mediated black female identity, and they analyze how black women have resisted often demeaning popular cultural perceptions in favor of more diverse, subtle presentations of self.
The pieces in this book—all of them published here for the first time—address a wide range of topics, from antebellum American poetry to nineteenth-century African American actors, and twentieth-century pulp fiction.
Recovering the Black Female Body recognizes the pressing need to highlight through scholarship the vibrant energy of African American women’s attempts to wrest control of the physical and symbolic construction of their bodies away from the distortions of others.
Contributors are Margaret Bass, Dorri Rabung Beam, Michael Bennett, Jacqueline E. Brady, Daphne A. Brooks, Vanessa D. Dickerson, Meredith Goldsmith, Yvette Louis, Ajuan Maria Mance, Noliwe Rooks, Mark Winokur, and Doris Witt. This book also contains a foreword by Carla L. Peterson and an afterword by Deborah E. McDowell.
This penetrating work culls key concepts from grassroots activism to hold critical social theory accountable to the needs, ideas, and organizational practices of the global justice movement. The resulting critique of neoliberalism hinges on place-based struggles of groups marginalized by globalization and represents a brave rethinking of politics, economy, culture, and professionalism.
Providing new practical and conceptual tools for responding to human and environmental crises in Appalachia and beyond, Recovering the Commons radically revises the framework of critical social thought regarding our stewardship of the civic and ecological commons. Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor ally social theory, field sciences, and local knowledge in search of healthy connections among body, place, and commons that form a basis for solidarity as well as a vital infrastructure for a reliable, durable world. Drawing particularly on the work of philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Dewey, and Hannah Arendt, the authors reconfigure social theory by ridding it of the aspects that reduce place and community to sets of interchangeable components. Instead, they reconcile complementary pairs such as mind/body and society/nature in the reclamation of public space.
With its analysis embedded in philosophical and material contexts, this penetrating work culls key concepts from grassroots activism to hold critical social theory accountable to the needs, ideas, and organizational practices of the global justice movement. The resulting critique of neoliberalism hinges on place-based struggles of groups marginalized by globalization and represents a brave rethinking of politics, economy, culture, and professionalism.
The body is both a site for medical practice and a source of therapeutic and scientific tools. As such, there are a variety of meanings ascribed to the body which both affect and are affected by cultural, economic, political and legal complexities. In order to access and use body parts, Linda F. Hogle states, transformative scientific and cultural processes are brought into play. Nowhere is this more evident than present-day Germany, where the spectre of Nazi medical experimentation still plays a large role in national policies governing the use of body parts and the way these policies are put into practice. In their efforts to be perceived as not repeating atrocities of the past, German medical practitioners and policy-makers reformulate ideas of bodily violation. To further confuse the issue, the reunification of East and West Germany has engendered new questions about the relationship between individuals’ bodies, science, and the state.
Hogle shows how “universal” medicine is reinterpreted through the lens of national and transnational politics and history, using comparative examples from her research in the United. States. Recovering the Nation’s Body is the first book to analyze the actual practices involved in procuring human tissue, and the first to examine how the German past and the unique present-day situation within the European Union are key in understanding the form that medical practices take within various contexts.
Sketching out the scientific foundations for a unified theory of repression that integrates the findings of the laboratory and the clinic, this comprehensive and authoritative synthesis of a century of memory research will be crucial reading for psychologists and clinicians, as well as forensic and legal professionals interested in the recovery of "inaccessible" memories.
"By debunking hypnosis, [Erdelyi] has allowed the debate on memory to move forward. . . . Erdelyi's work on hypermnesia is very important to our understanding of the mechanisms of memory and the brain."—Janet D. Feigenbaum, Times Literary Supplement
While solutions to these problems are complex and always have their roots in local circumstance, the essays in Recovery, Renewal, Reclaiming will inspire strategies that will clear blighted environments, deliver nourishing food, ease the lives of marginalized people, and lead to respect for all beliefs as we work together to bring balance to our environmental, physical, and spiritual health.
Selling “genetically gifted” human eggs on the free market for a hefty price. In vitro fertilization. Fetal rights. Prenatal diagnosis. Surrogacy. All are instances of biomedical and social “advancements” with which we have become familiar in recent years. Yet these issues are often regarded as distinct or only loosely related under the rubric of reproduction.
Barbara Katz Rothman demonstrates how they form a complex whole that demands of us in response a woman-centered, class-sensitive way of understanding motherhood. We need a social policy for dealing with mothers and motherhood that is consistent with feminist politics and feminist theory. Her book show how we as a society must first recognize that the real needs of mother, father, and children have been swept aside in an attempt to reduce the complex process of human reproduction to a clinical event that can be controlled by medical technology. Rothman suggests ways to accomplish social and legal change that would allow technological advances to affirm motherhood and the mother-child relationship without cost to women’s identity.
This new edition of Recreating Motherhood contains exciting updates. Rothman shows how this material is key in understanding the family, not just motherhood. And a new chapter, “Reflections on a Decade,” explores how new reproductive technologies combine with new marketing and new genetics to pose troubling social questions.
Many of the ethical issues raised by new technologies have not been widely examined, discussed, or indeed settled. For example, robotics technology challenges the notion of personhood. Should a robot, capable of making what humans would call ethical decisions, be held responsible for those decisions and the resultant actions? Should society reward and punish robots in the same way that it does humans? Likewise, issues of safety, environmental concerns, and distributive justice arise with the increasing acceptance of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food production nanotechnology in engineering and medicine, and human gene therapy and enhancement. The problem of dual-use—when a technology can be used both to benefit and to harm—exists with virtually all new technologies but is central in the context of emerging 21st century technologies ranging from artificial intelligence and robotics to human gene-editing and brain-computer interfacing.
In Re-Creating Nature: Science, Technology, and Human Values in the Twenty-First Century, James T. Bradley addresses emerging biotechnologies with prodigious potential to benefit humankind but that are also fraught with ethical consequences. Some actually possess the power to directly alter the evolution of life on earth including human. Specifically, these topics include stem cells, synthetic biology, GMOs in agriculture, nanotechnology, bioterrorism, CRISPR gene-editing technology, three-parent babies, robotics and roboethics, artificial intelligence, and human brain research and neurotechnologies.
Offering clear explanations of these various technologies, a pragmatic presentation of the conundrums involved, and questions that illuminate hypothetical situations, Bradley guides discussions of these and other thorny issues resulting from the development of new biotechnologies. He also highlights the responsibilities of scientists to conduct research in an ethical manner and the responsibilities of nonscientists to become “science literate” in the twenty-first century.
Remarkable similarities exist within the Maya tradition, even as new mythologies were introduced through contact with the Gulf Coast region and highland central Mexico. Vail and Hernández analyze the extant Maya codices within the context of later literary sources such as the Books of Chilam Balam, the Popol Vuh, and the Códice Chimalpopoca to present numerous examples highlighting the relationship among creation mythology, rituals, and lore. Compiling and comparing Maya creation mythology with that of the Borgia codices from highland central Mexico, Re-Creating Primordial Time is a significant contribution to the field of Mesoamerican studies and will be of interest to scholars of archaeology, linguistics, epigraphy, and comparative religions alike.
In the view of many Christians, the teenage years are simultaneously the most dangerous and the most promising. At the very moment when teens are trying to establish a sense of identity and belonging, they are beset by temptation on all sides—from the pressure of their peers to the nihilism and materialism of popular culture. Add the specter of homosexuality to the mix, and you’ve got a situation ripe for worry, sermonizing, and exploitation.
In Recruiting Young Love, Mark D. Jordan explores more than a half century of American church debate about homosexuality to show that even as the main lesson—homosexuality is bad, teens are vulnerable—has remained constant, the arguments and assumptions have changed remarkably. At the time of the first Kinsey Report, in 1948, homosexuality was simultaneously condemned and little discussed—a teen struggling with same-sex desire would have found little specific guidance. Sixty years later, church rhetoric has undergone a radical shift, as silence has given way to frequent, public, detailed discussion of homosexuality and its perceived dangers. Along the way, churches have quietly adopted much of the language and ideas of modern sexology, psychiatry, and social reformers—deploying it, for example, to buttress the credentials of anti-gay “deprogramming” centers and traditional gender roles.
Jordan tells this story through a wide variety of sources, including oral histories, interviews, memoirs, and even pulp novels; the result is a fascinating window onto the never-ending battle for the teenage soul.
How, why, and according to whose definitions and requirements does a culture self-consciously create memory and project its fate? In this remarkable book—the first in English to treat Russian history as theatre and cultural performance—Spencer Golub reveals the performative nature of Russian history in the twentieth century and the romantic imprisonment/self-imprisonment of the creative intelligentsia within this scenario.
Epic has often been seen as a dead genre, intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. Furthermore, the psychological model most frequently applied to the relations between poets has been a violent one--the Freudian masterplot of Oedipus slaying the father to possess the mother. The limited usefulness of such simplistic explanations of epic is readily apparent when confronted with the continuing production of epic poetry long after its so-called death; when confronted with the contemporary drive toward epic among women poets, people of color, and postcolonial poets; and when faced with epic's fundamentally recursive desire--obvious in oral epic, but common to the entire genre--to repeat rather than to kill or evade its precursors.
Recursive desire, rooted in more basic preoedipal negotiations of union and separation rather than in Oedipal conflict, provides an elegant and far more useful explanation. By rereading and substantially redefining epic in this way, this book recognizes and reinvests with meaning the vital recursive qualities of the genre. Examining a diverse array of texts from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Derek Walcott's Osmeros, from the Homeric epics to H.D.'s Helen in Egypt. The book develops a broadened, inclusive, and living tradition of epic poetry, demonstrating the continuities of that tradition across dramatic discontinuities in time, place, worldview, and technology.
Recursive Desire rereads epic tradition and specific epic poems in ways that challenge traditional notions of the genre and open up unexplored fields of endeavor to students of epic, of poetry, and of narrative. With its more powerful and comprehensive psychological model of poetic relations, the book provides readers with a new understanding of epic poetry and its vital, shifting, polyvocal array (and disarray) of textual forces.
Three eminent economists provide in this book a rigorous, self-contained treatment of modern economic dynamics. Nancy L. Stokey, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., and Edward C. Prescott develop the basic methods of recursive analysis and emphasize the many areas where they can usefully be applied.
After presenting an overview of the recursive approach, the authors develop economic applications for deterministic dynamic programming and the stability theory of first-order difference equations. They then treat stochastic dynamic programming and the convergence theory of discrete-time Markov processes, illustrating each with additional economic applications. They also derive a strong law of large numbers for Markov processes. Finally, they present the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics and show how to apply the methods developed earlier to general equilibrium systems.
The authors go on to apply their methods to many areas of economics. Models of firm and industry investment, household consumption behavior, long-run growth, capital accumulation, job search, job matching, inventory behavior, asset pricing, and money demand are among those they use to show how predictions can be made about individual and social behavior. Researchers and graduate students in many areas of economics, both theoretical and applied, will find this book essential.
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