This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
In this age of nearly unprecedented partisan rancor, you’d be forgiven for thinking we could all do with a smaller daily dose of politics. In his provocative and sharp book, however, Ned O’Gorman argues just the opposite: Politics for Everybody contends that what we really need to do is engage more deeply with politics, rather than chuck the whole thing out the window. In calling for a purer, more humanistic relationship with politics—one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange—O’Gorman draws on the work of Hannah Arendt (1906–75). As a German-born Jewish thinker who fled the Nazis for the United States, Arendt set out to defend politics from its many detractors along several key lines: the challenge of separating genuine politics from distorted forms; the difficulty of appreciating politics for what it is; the problems of truth and judgment in politics; and the role of persuasion in politics. O’Gorman’s book offers an insightful introduction to Arendt’s ideas for anyone who wants to think more carefully
Same-sex marriage emerged in 2004 as one of the hottest issues of the campaign season. But in a severe blow to gay rights advocates, all eleven states that had the issue on the ballot passed amendments banning the practice, and the subject soon dropped off the media’s radar. This pattern of waxing and waning in the public eye has characterized the debate over same-sex marriage since 1996 and the passing of the Defense of Marriage Act. Since then, court rulings and local legislatures have kept the issue alive in the political sphere, and conservatives and gay rights advocates have made the issue a key battlefield in the culture wars.
The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage brings together an esteemed list of scholars to explore all facets of this heated issue, including the ideologies and strategies on both sides of the argument, the public’s response, the use of the issue in political campaigns, and how same-sex marriage fits into the broad context of policy cycles and windows of political opportunity. With comprehensive coverage from a variety of different approaches, this volume will be a vital sourcebook for activists, politicians, and scholars alike.
Since its founding in 1898, the Art Commission of the City of New York (ACNY) has served as the city’s aesthetic gatekeeper, evaluating all works of art intended for display on city property. And over the years, the commission’s domain has expanded dramatically to include everything from parks and courthouses to trash cans and sidewalks. In ThePolitics of Urban Beauty, Michele H. Bogart argues that this unprecedented authority has made the commission host to some complex negotiations—involving artists, architects, business leaders, activists, and politicians—about not only the role of art in urban design, but also the shape and meaning of the city and its public spaces.
A former vice president of the ACNY, Bogart tells its story here from an insider’s perspective, tracing the commission’s history from its origins as an outgrowth of progressive reform to its role in New York’s reconstruction after 9/11. Drawing on archival correspondence, drawings, and photographs from commission collections, Bogart presents bracing examples of works—ranging from New Deal murals to Louis Kahn’s unbuilt Memorial to Six Million Jewish Martyrs—that illuminate the ACNY’s subtle yet powerful role in shaping New York’s identity.
The Politics of Urban Beauty is thus a fascinating history of a New York art world that paralleled—and sometimes unpredictably intersected with—the more familiar realm of prominent architects, painters, galleries, and museums. Bogart’s fresh view adds a critical dimension to our understanding of “the city beautiful” and makes an important and lively contribution to the study of art history, urban design, and New York City itself.
From Plato through the nineteenth century, the West could draw on comprehensive political visions to guide government and society. Now, for the first time in more than two thousand years, Tracy B. Strong contends, we have lost our foundational supports. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the state of political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has left us effectively “thinking without a banister.”
The relationship between the states and the national government is among the most contested issues in the United States. And questions about where power should reside, how decisions should be made, and how responsibility should be allocated have been central to the American experiment in federalism. In Polyphonic Federalism, Robert A. Schapiro defends the advantages of multiple perspectives in government, arguing that the resulting “polyphony” creates a system that is more efficient, democratic, and protective of liberties.
This groundbreaking volume contends that contemporary views of federalism are plagued by outmoded dualist notions that seek to separate state and federal authority. Instead, Schapiro proposes a polyphonic model that emphasizes the valuable interaction of state and federal law, one that more accurately describes the intersecting realities of local and national power. Through an analysis of several legal and policy debates, Polyphonic Federalism demonstrates how a multifaceted government can best realize the potential of federalism to protect fundamental rights.
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history.
What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history.
Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.
Americans commonly recognize television, e-mail, and instant messaging as agents of pervasive cultural change. But many of us may not realize that what we now call snail mail was once just as revolutionary. As David M. Henkin argues in The Postal Age, a burgeoning postal network initiated major cultural shifts during the nineteenth century, laying the foundation for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving world of telecommunications.
This fascinating history traces these shifts from their beginnings in the mid-1800s, when cheaper postage, mass literacy, and migration combined to make the long-established postal service a more integral and viable part of everyday life. With such dramatic events as the Civil War and the gold rush underscoring the importance and necessity of the post, a surprisingly broad range of Americans—male and female, black and white, native-born and immigrant—joined this postal network, regularly interacting with distant locales before the existence of telephones or even the widespread use of telegraphy. Drawing on original letters and diaries from the period, as well as public discussions of the expanding postal system, Henkin tells the story of how these Americans adjusted to a new world of long-distance correspondence, crowded post offices, junk mail, valentines, and dead letters.
The Postal Age paints a vibrant picture of a society where possibilities proliferated for the kinds of personal and impersonal communications that we often associate with more recent historical periods. In doing so, it significantly increases our understanding of both antebellum America and our own chapter in the history of communications.
Gandhi, with his loincloth and walking stick, seems an unlikely advocate of postmodernism. But in Postmodern Gandhi, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph portray him as just that in eight thought-provoking essays that aim to correct the common association of Gandhi with traditionalism.
Combining core sections of their influential book Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma with substantial new material, the Rudolphs reveal here that Gandhi was able to revitalize tradition while simultaneously breaking with some of its entrenched values and practices. Exploring his influence both in India and abroad, they tell the story of how in London the young activist was shaped by the antimodern “other West” of Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Thoreau and how, a generation later, a mature Gandhi’s thought and action challenged modernity’s hegemony. Moreover, the Rudolphs argue that Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization in his 1909 book Hind Swaraj was an opening salvo of the postmodern era and that his theory and practice of nonviolent collective action (satyagraha) articulate and exemplify a postmodern understanding of situational truth.
This radical interpretation of Gandhi's life will appeal to anyone who wants to understand Gandhi’s relevance in this century, as well as students and scholars of politics, history, charismatic leadership, and postcolonialism.
The Indian subdistrict of Shahabad, located in the dwindling forests of the southeastern tip of Rajasthan, is an area of extreme poverty. Beset by droughts and food shortages in recent years, it is the home of the Sahariyas, former bonded laborers, officially classified as Rajasthan’s only “primitive tribe.” From afar, we might consider this the bleakest of the bleak, but in Poverty and the Quest for Life, Bhrigupati Singh asks us to reconsider just what quality of life means. He shows how the Sahariyas conceive of aspiration, advancement, and vitality in both material and spiritual terms, and how such bridging can engender new possibilities of life.
Singh organizes his study around two themes: power and ethics, through which he explores a complex terrain of material and spiritual forces. Authority remains contested, whether in divine or human forms; the state is both despised and desired; high and low castes negotiate new ways of living together, in conflict but also cooperation; new gods move across rival social groups; animals and plants leave their tracks on human subjectivity and religiosity; and the potential for vitality persists even as natural resources steadily disappear. Studying this milieu, Singh offers new ways of thinking beyond the religion-secularism and nature-culture dichotomies, juxtaposing questions about quality of life with political theologies of sovereignty, neighborliness, and ethics, in the process painting a rich portrait of perseverance and fragility in contemporary rural India.
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