front cover of The Post-Conflict Environment
The Post-Conflict Environment
Investigation and Critique
Daniel Bertrand Monk and Jacob Mundy, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2014
In case studies focusing on contemporary crises spanning Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, the scholars in this volume examine the dominant prescriptive practices of late neoliberal post-conflict interventions—such as statebuilding, peacebuilding, transitional justice, refugee management, reconstruction, and redevelopment—and contend that the post-conflict environment is in fact created and sustained by this international technocratic paradigm of peacebuilding. Key international stakeholders—from activists to politicians, humanitarian agencies to financial institutions—characterize disparate sites as “weak,” “fragile,” or “failed” states and, as a result, prescribe peacebuilding techniques that paradoxically disable effective management of post-conflict spaces while perpetuating neoliberal political and economic conditions. Treating all efforts to represent post-conflict environments as problematic, the goal becomes understanding the underlying connection between post-conflict conditions and the actions and interventions of peacebuilding technocracies.
[more]

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The Postdevelopmental State
Dilemmas of Economic Democratization in Contemporary South Korea
Jamie Doucette
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Over the last 25 years, South Korea has witnessed growing inequality due to the proliferation of non-standard employment, ballooning household debt, deepening export-dependency, and the growth of super-conglomerates such as Samsung and Hyundai. Combined with declining rates of economic growth and turbulent political events, these processes mark a departure from Korea’s past recognition as a high growth “developmental state.”

The Postdevelopmental State radically reframes research into the South Korean economy by foregrounding the efforts of pro-democratic reformers and social movements in South Korea to create an alternative economic model—one that can address Korea’s legacy of authoritarian economic development during the Cold War and neoliberal restructuring since the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. Understanding these attempts offers insight into the types of economic reforms that have been enacted since the late 1990s as well as the continued legacy of dictatorship-era politics within the Korean political and legal system. By examining the dilemmas economic democracy has encountered over the past 25 years, from the IMF Crisis to the aftermath of the Candlelight Revolution, the book reveals the enormous and comprehensive challenges involved in addressing the legacy of authoritarian economic models and their neoliberal transformations.
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The Postwar Transformation of Germany
Democracy, Prosperity and Nationhood
John S. Brady, Beverly Crawford, and Sarah Elise Wiliarty, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1999
As Germany celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany--the former West Germany-- leading scholars take stock in this volume of the political, social, and economic progress Germany made as it built a democratic political system and a powerful economy, survived the Cold War, and dealt with the challenges of reunification.
The contributors address issues such as Germany's response to extremists, the development of a professional civil service, judicial review, the maintenance of the welfare state, the nature of contemporary German nationalism, and Germany's role in the world.
Contributors are Thomas Banchoff, Thomas U. Berger, Patricia Davis, Ernst Haas, Jost Halfmann, Christard Hoffmann, Carl-Lugwig Holtfrerich, Donald P. Kommers, Wolfgang Krieger, Peter Krueger, Gregg O. Kvistad, Ludger Lindlar, Charles Maier, Andrei Markovitz, Peter Merkl, Claus Offe, Simon Reich, and Michaela Richter.
John S. Brady and Sarah Elise Wiliarty are doctoral candidates in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. Beverly Crawford is Professor of Political Science, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy of Industrial Societies, and Associate Director, Center for German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
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Pound/Cummings
The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings
Barry Ahearn, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings carried on a long and varied correspondence from the 1920s until Cummings's death in 1962. This volume collects all of the important letters from this important friendship in the history of modern poetry.
Throughout the correspondence both poets reveal themselves and their beliefs to a remarkable degree. Pound entrusted to Cummings details of his political outlook in the 1930s and 1940s, including his opinions about Mussolini's Italy. The letters to Cummings also shed new light on the question of Pound's sanity after World War II. Although he was diagnosed as mentally unfit, the letters generally show no evidence of paranoia, only of his characteristic eccentricity.
Similarly, these letters should provoke a reevaluation of Cummings. Critics have treated Cummings's political views as either strictly private matters or merely incidental to his art. The letters, however, show that Cummings's radically conservative political opinions are wholly consistent with his poetics, and raise the question of the relation between Cummings's political principles and his enthusiasm for particular forms (and particular stars) of mass entertainment.
In addition to their political revelations, the letters are steeped in the literary climate--and literary gossip--of the times. Pound comments often and candidly on Cummings's poetry and prose; both Pound and Cummings send light verse to each other. And the poets exchange anecdotes about such figures as Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Edmund Grosse, Max Eastman, and Aldous Huxley, among other writers.
There is much here to interest and delight both fans and foes of Pound and Cummings. The book will be of primary importance to students and scholars of modern poetry, especially those who emphasize the intersection of literary works and political history.
Barry Ahearn is Associate Professor of English, Tulane University.
[more]

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The Poverty Law Canon
Exploring the Major Cases
Marie A. Failinger and Ezra Rosser, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2016
The Poverty Law Canon takes readers into the lives of the clients and lawyers who brought critical poverty law cases in the United States. These cases involved attempts to establish the right to basic necessities, as well as efforts to ensure dignified treatment of welfare recipients and to halt administrative attacks on federal program benefit levels. They also confronted government efforts to constrict access to justice, due process, and rights to counsel in child support and consumer cases, social welfare programs, and public housing. By exploring the personal narratives that gave rise to these lawsuits as well as the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the Supreme Court, the text locates these cases within the social dynamics that shaped the course of litigation.
 
Noted legal scholars explain the legal precedent created by each case and set the case within its historical and political context in a way that will assist students and advocates in poverty-related disciplines in their understanding of the implications of these cases for contemporary public policy decisions in poverty programs. Whether the focus is on the clients, on the lawyers, or on the justices, the stories in The Poverty Law Canon illuminate the central legal themes in federal poverty law of the late 20th century and the role that racial and economic stereotyping plays in shaping American law.
 
[more]

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Power / Knowledge / Land
Contested Ontologies of Land and Its Governance in Africa
Laura A. German
University of Michigan Press, 2022

The 2008 outcry over the “global land grab” made headlines around the world, leading to a sustained interest in the dynamics and fate of customary land among both academics and development practitioners. In Power/Knowledge/Land, author Laura German profiles the consolidation of a global knowledge regime surrounding land and its governance within international development circles in the decade following this outcry, and the growing enrollment of previously antagonistic actors within it. Drawing theoretical insights on the inseparability of power and knowledge, German reveals the dynamics of knowledge practices that have enabled the longstanding project of commodifying customary land – and the more contemporary interests in acquiring and financializing it – to be advanced and legitimated by capturing the energies of socially progressive forces. By bringing theories of change from the emergent land governance orthodoxy into dialogue with the ethnographic evidence from across the African continent and beyond, concepts masquerading as universal and self-evident truths are provincialized, and their role in commodifying customary land and entrenching colonial futurities put on display. In doing so, the volume brings wider academic debates surrounding productive forms of power into the heart of the land grab debate, while enhancing their accessibility to a wider audience.

Power/Knowledge/Land takes current scholarly debates surrounding land grabs beyond their theoretical moorings in critical agrarian studies, political economy and globalization into contemporary debates surrounding the politics of knowledge—from theories of coloniality to ontological anthropology, thereby enabling new dynamics of the phenomenon to be revealed. The book deploys a pioneering epistemology integrating deconstructionist approaches (to reveal the tactics, truth claims and ontological assumptions of global knowledge brokers), with systematic qualitative reviews and comparative study (to contrast these dominant constructs with the evidence and reveal alternative ways of knowing “land” and practicing “security” from the ethnographic literature). This helps to reveal the Western and modernist biases in the narratives that have been advanced about women, custom, and security, revealing how the coloniality of knowledge works to grease the wheels of land takings by advancing highly provincialized constructs aligned with western interests as universal truths.

[more]

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Power and Negotiation
I. William Zartman and Jeffrey Z. Rubin, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Using new definitions of the concept of power, this book examines the relations between parties in symmetrical and asymmetrical negotiations. I. William Zartman and Jeffrey Z. Rubin argue that negotiations between countries that are not equal in power tend to be more efficient and effective than symmetrical negotiations. Weaker and stronger parties negotiating together know their roles and are able to get appropriate benefits to each side in a negotiated agreement. This is particularly true when a relationship holds the parties together. In cases of symmetry or near symmetry the countries, whether they are equally weak or equally strong, tend to spend most of their time maintaining their status and waste inordinate amounts of time before they ever come to an agreement. These conclusions run counter to the most accepted wisdom of negotiations, although they do confirm evidence from careful experiments.
Power and Negotiation is a unique study that addresses the concept of power and produces new findings both about the concept itself and about its applications to negotiation. It rejects both the notion of power as a resource and power as an ability. Instead, the work defines power as an act that is designed to cause the other party to move in a desired direction, thus separating the concept both from its source and from its effects and leaving it open to much more detailed analysis. At the same time, it also examines perceived power on the basis of which symmetries and asymmetries in the relations between parties can be identified. It then looks at six cases of clear asymmetry, two cases of symmetry, and one mixed situation. The book ends with a careful examination of lessons for practice and lessons for theory.
The book will appeal to students of negotiation strategy and international relations.
I. William Zartman is Jacob Blaustein Professor of International Organization and Conflict Resolution, The Johns Hopkins University. The late Jeffrey Z. Rubin was Professor of Psychology at Tufts University.
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Power and Possibility
Essays, Reviews, and Interviews
Elizabeth Alexander
University of Michigan Press, 2007

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

Elizabeth Alexander is considered one of the country's most gifted contemporary poets, and the publication of her essays in The Black Interior in 2004 established her as an astute critic and cultural commentator as well. Arnold Rampersad has called Alexander "one of the brightest stars in our literary sky . . . a superb, invaluable commentator on the American scene." In this new collection of her essays, reviews, and interviews, Alexander again focuses on African American artistic production, particularly poetry, and the cultural contexts in which it is created and experienced.

The book's first section, "Black Arts 101," takes up the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sterling Brown, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rita Dove (among others); artist Romare Bearden; dancer Bill T. Jones; and dramatist August Wilson. A second section, "Black Feminist Thinking," provides engaging meditations ranging from "My Grandmother's Hair" and "A Very Short History of Black Women and Food" to essays on the legacies of Toni Cade, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan. The collection's final section, "Talking," includes interviews, a commencement address---"Black Graduation"---and the essay "Africa and the World."

Elizabeth Alexander received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She has published four books of poems: The Venus Hottentot (1990); Body of Life (1996); Antebellum Dream Book (2001); and, most recently, American Sublime (2005), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her play, Diva Studies, was produced at the Yale School of Drama. She is presently Professor of American and African American Studies at Yale University.

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Power of Freedom
Hu Shih's Political Writings
Chih-p'ing Chou and Carlos Yu-Kai Lin, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Dr. Hu Shih (1891–1962) was one of China’s top scholars and diplomats and served as the Republic of China’s ambassador to the United States during World War II.  As early as 1941, Hu Shih warned of the fundamental ideological conflict between dictatorial totalitarianism and democratic systems, a view that later became the foundation of the Cold War narrative.  In the 1950s, after Mao’s authoritarian regime was established, Hu Shih started to analyze the development and nature of Communism, delivering a series of lectures and addresses to reveal what he called Stalin’s “grand strategy” for facilitating the International Communist Movement.

For decades—and today to a certain extent—Hu Shih’s political writings were considered sensitive and even dangerous.  As a strident critic of the Chinese Communist Party’s oligarchical practices, he was targeted by the CCP in a concerted national campaign to smear his reputation, cast aspersions on his writings, and generally destroy any possible influence he might have in China.  This volume brings together a collection of Hu Shih’s most important, mostly unpublished, English-language speeches, interviews, and commentaries on international politics, China-U.S. relations, and the International Communist Movement.  Taken together, these works provide an insider’s perspective on Sino-American relations and the development of the International Communist Movement over the course of the 20th century.
[more]

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The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus
Paul Zanker; translated by Alan Shapiro
University of Michigan Press, 1990
"Art and architecture are mirrors of a society. They reflect the state of its values, especially in times of crisis or transition." Upon this premise Paul Zanker builds an interpretation of Augustan art as a visual language that both expressed and furthered the transformation of Roman society during the rule of Augustus Caesar. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus illustrates how the establishment of monarchy under Augustus Caesar led to the creation of a new system of visual imagery that reflects the consciousness of this transitional age.
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Power over Property
The Political Economy of Communist Land Reform in China
Matthew Noellert
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spent the next three decades carrying out agrarian reform among nearly one-third of the world’s peasants. This book presents a new perspective on the first step of this reform, when the CCP helped redistribute over 40 million hectares of land to over three hundred million impoverished peasants in the nationwide land reform movement. This land reform, the founding myth of the People’s Republic of China (1949–present) and one of the largest redistributions of wealth and power in history, embodies the idea that an equal distribution of property will lead to social and political equality.
 
Power Over Property argues that in practice, however, the opposite occurred: the redistribution of political power led to a more equal distribution of property. China’s land reform was accomplished not only through the state’s power to define the distribution of resources, but also through village communities prioritizing political entitlements above property rights. Through the systematic analysis of never-before studied micro-level data on practices of land reform in over five hundred villages, Power Over Property demonstrates how land reform primarily involved the removal of former power holders, the mobilization of mass political participation, and the creation of a new social-political hierarchy. Only after accomplishing all of this was it possible to redistribute land. This redistribution, moreover, was determined by political relations to a new structure of power, not just economic relations to the means of production.
 
The experience of China’s land reform complicates our understanding of the relations between economic, social, and political equality. On the one hand, social equality in China was achieved through political, not economic means. On the other hand, the fundamental solution was a more effective hierarchy of fair entitlements, not equal rights. This book ultimately suggests that focusing on economic equality alone may obscure more important social and political dynamics in the development of the modern world.
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Power without Force
The Political Capacity of Nation-States
Robert W. Jackman
University of Michigan Press, 1993

Decolonization after World War II led to a significant global increase in the number of states. Each new nation was born with high expectations. But these hopes were soon eroded by the ineffectiveness and capriciousness of many of the new regimes. In many states military juntas have become the order of the day, and even where juntas have not taken power, political differences have repeatedly degenerated into violent exchanges that do not readily lend themselves to political settlement. Not only the new states have suffered from these problems; indeed, political solutions to conflict have become depressingly conspicuous by their absence.

Against this background, the last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in evaluating the political capacity or strength of modern nation-states. In Power without Force, Robert Jackman argues that political capacity has two broad components: organizational age and legitimacy. Thus, it is essential to focus both on institutions conceived in organizational terms and the amount of compliance and consent that leaders are able to engender. The emphasis on each reflects the view that political life centers on the exercise of power, and that, unlike physical force, power is intrinsically relational. Although all states have he capability to inflict physical sanctions, their ability to exercise power is the key element of their political capacity.

Drawing on a wide range of studies from political science, sociology, and political economy, Power without Force redirects attention to the central issues of political capacity. By stressing that effective conflict resolution must be addressed in political terms, this volume underscores perennial issues of governance and politics that form the heart of comparative politics and political sociology.

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The Power-Conflict Story
A Dynamic Model of Interstate Rivalry
Kelly M. Kadera
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The Power-Conflict Story explains patterns of behavior in major world rivalries since 1816. Kelly M. Kadera carefully lays out the dynamic connections between two rival nations' power relationship and their conflictual interactions with one another. Rivals accumulate power and use conflict as a method of reducing their opponent's power level. But conflict is costly because it invites reciprocation from the opponent who has similar motives. Applying the formal model that she has developed, Kadera makes some interesting and novel predictions about which types of rivals win and what strategies they use. The empirical record on national power levels and interstate conflict convincingly support these predictions. Examples include the rise of the United States as a world power and the corresponding fall of British hegemony near the turn of the last century; Germany's unsuccessful attempt to overtake Britain during the Second World War; and Russia's rivalry with China during the early 1900s.
One of the central contributions of the book's explanation of interstate rivalry is the integration of two opposing schools of thought, balance of power theory and power transition theory. This integration is accomplished by the author's dynamic formal model that emphasizes fluctuations in conflict behavior under different power relationships as well as shifts in power levels resulting from natural growth and resource depletion. The formal model and its analysis are presented in a conversational manner, making it accessible to the reader.
ThePower-Conflict Story will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, world history, formal modeling, applied mathematics, numerical methods, and research methodology.
Kelly M. Kadera is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Iowa.
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Powerful Voices
The Musical and Social World of Collegiate A Cappella
Joshua S. Duchan
University of Michigan Press, 2016

Collegiate a cappella, part of a long tradition of unaccompanied singing, is known to date back on American college campuses to at least the colonial era. Considered in the context of college glee clubs, barbershop quartets, early-twentieth-century vocal pop groups, doo-wop groups, and contemporary a cappella manifestations in pop music, collegiate a cappella is an extension of a very old tradition of close harmony singing---one that includes but also goes beyond the founding of the Yale Whiffenpoofs. Yet despite this important history, collegiate a cappella has until now never been the subject of scholarly examination.

In Powerful Voices: The Musical and Social World of Collegiate A Cappella, Joshua S. Duchan offers the first thorough accounting of the music's history and  reveals how the critical issues of sociability, gender, performance, and technology affect its music and experience. Just as importantly, Duchan provides a vital contribution to music scholarship more broadly, in several important ways: by expanding the small body of literature on choruses and amateur music; by addressing musical and social processes in a field where the vast majority of scholarship focuses on individuals and their products; and by highlighting a musical context long neglected by musicologists---the college campus. Ultimately, Powerful Voices is a window on a world of amateur music that has begun to expand its reach internationally, carrying this uniquely American musical form to new global audiences, while playing an important role in the social, cultural, and musical education of countless singers over the last century.


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The Powers that Punish
Prison and Politics in the Era of the "Big House", 1920-1955
Charles Bright
University of Michigan Press, 1996

In a pathbreaking study of a major state prison, Michigan's Jackson State Penitentiary during the middle years of this century, Charles Bright addresses several aspects of the history and theory of punishment. The study is an institutional history of an American penitentiary, concerned with how a carceral regime was organized and maintained, how prisoners were treated and involved in the creation of a regime of order and how penal practices were explained and defended in public. In addition, it is a meditation upon punishment in modern society and a critical engagement with prevailing theories of punishment coming out of liberal, Marxist and post structuralist traditions. Deploying theory critically in a historic narrative, it applies new, relational theories of power to political institutions and practices. Finally, in studying the history of the Jackson prison, Bright provides a rich account, full of villains and a few heroes, of state politics in Michigan during a period of rapid transition between the 1920s to the 1950s.

The book will be of direct relevance to criminologists and scholars of punishment, and to historians concerned with the history of punishment and prisons in the United States. It will also be useful to political scientists and historians concerned with exploring new approaches to the study of power and with the transformation of state politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Finally Bright tells a story which will fascinate students of modern Michigan history.

Charles Bright is a historian and Lecturer at the Residential College of the University of Michigan.

[more]

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Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama
Jon D. Rossini
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama explores the work of a unique group of playwrights—Puerto Rican dramatists writing in the United States—who offer a model of political engagement. As members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, they have a heightened awareness of the systematic discrimination and the colonial citizenship created by Puerto Rico’s territorial status. Pragmatic Liberation analyzes the work of established playwrights as well as work that has previously received little attention in the world of theater studies, including René Marqués’s Palm Sunday. The book demonstrates the strategies these playwrights use to model a nuanced way of moving toward liberation while being sensitive to the potential impact these actions might have on those closest to us. This is a crucially important model that needs more attention in our currently polarized political moment.
[more]

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The Praise of Folly
Desiderius Erasmus
University of Michigan Press, 1958
A satire on the pretensions of Erasmus's contemporaries in the Church and philosophy
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Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way
Izumi Shikibu and the Buddhist Literature of Medieval Japan
R. Keller Kimbrough
University of Michigan Press, 2008
According to a sixteenth-century Japanese commentary on the Lotus Sutra, the venerable Chinsō Kashō was once preaching on the “ten wickednesses of women” when an angry old nun stepped out from the audience and shouted, “It’s not just women who are so evil—you’ve got plenty of wickedness in you, too!” Women were reviled in much of the popular Buddhist rhetoric of medieval Japan, castigated for their “filthy femininity,” but their low spiritual status was in fact frequently contested. This dispute over the place of women in Buddhism was often played out in the realm of medieval preachers’ and storytellers’ apocryphal tales of the lives, deaths, and inevitable religious awakenings of prominent female literary figures of an earlier age. Inspired by the folklorist Yanagita Kunio’s groundbreaking work of the early 1930s, Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way explores the ways in which such fictional and usually scandalous stories of the Heian women authors Izumi Shikibu, Ono no Komachi, Murasaki Shikibu, and Sei Shōnagon were employed in the competitive preaching and fund-raising of late-Heian and medieval Japan.
The book draws upon a broad range of medieval textual and pictorial sources to describe the diverse and heretofore little-studied roles of itinerant and temple-based preacher-entertainers in the formation and dissemination of medieval literary culture. By plumbing the medieval roots of Heian women poets’ contemporary fame, Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way illuminates a forgotten world of doctrinal and institutional rivalry, sectarian struggle, and passionately articulated belief, revealing the processes by which Izumi Shikibu and her peers came to be celebrated as the national cultural icons that they are today.
[more]

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Preaching to Convert
Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age
John Fletcher
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Preaching to Convert offers an intriguing new perspective on the outreach strategies of U.S. evangelicals, framing them as examples of activist performance, broadly defined as acts performed before an audience in the hopes of changing hearts and minds. Most writing about activist performance has focused on left-progressive causes, events, and actors. Preaching to Convert argues against such a constricted view of activism and for a more nuanced understanding of U.S. evangelicalism as a movement defined by its desire to win converts and spread the gospel.
 
The book positions evangelicals as a diverse, complicated group confronting the loss of conservative Christianity’s default status in 21st-century U.S. culture. In the face of an increasingly secular age, evangelicals have been reassessing models of outreach. In acts like handing out Bible tracts to strangers on the street or going door-to-door with a Bible in hand, in elaborately staged horror-themed morality plays or multimillion-dollar creationist discovery centers, in megachurch services beamed to dozens of satellite campuses, and in controversial “ex-gay” ministries striving to return gays and lesbians to the straight and narrow, evangelicals are redefining what it means to be deeply committed in a pluralist world. The book’s engaging style and careful argumentation make it accessible and appealing to scholars and students across a range of fields.
[more]

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The Preceramic Horizons of Northeastern Oklahoma
David Albert Baerreis
University of Michigan Press, 1951
David Albert Baerreis reports on the excavation of three sites in Delaware County in northeastern Oklahoma, and the artifacts found there. The author focuses on lithics (projectile points and other chipped stone tools as well as ground stone tools) and provides a comparative analysis of the material.
[more]

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Predators and Parasites
Persistent Agents of Transnational Harm and Great Power Authority
Oded Löwenheim
University of Michigan Press, 2007
What explains variance in the policy of Great Powers toward drug traffickers, pirates, and terrorists? Does counterharm policy depend just on the degree of material harm caused to a powerful state by such nonstate actors, or do normative, moral, and emotional factors also play a role? Why did the U.S., for example, harshly punish al Qaeda after 9/11 but avoid taking similar forceful measures against foreign drug traffickers who enable the deaths of thousands of Americans each year by selling highly illegal and harmful narcotics? Oded Löwenheim argues that the answers to these questions lie in the social construction of agents of harm.
 
 
"Predators and Parasites shows, with impressive scholarship, that world politics is characterized by a cartel-like structure that gives states monopolies of legitimate violence. Sovereignty and a global structure of authority are not mutually exclusive. In a sense, anarchy is in the eye of the beholder."
—Robert O. Keohane, Princeton University

"An invaluable contribution to the growing body of constructivist literature in international relations and should be read by anyone interested in the use of force in contemporary global politics . . . Goes a long way toward explaining America's War on Terror against al Qaeda and the Taliban and the widespread global support for this policy, as well as the highly negative global reaction to America's own intervention in Iraq and its norm-threatening doctrine of preemption."
—Richard W. Mansbach, Iowa State University
"Prepare to be boarded! Löwenheim delivers an essential constructivist tutorial on Great Power sovereignty and authority. An intellectual swashbuckler!"
—Rodney Bruce Hall, Oxford University

"Rejecting preventive war for moral consistency and just conduct, a fascinating discussion of pirates, terrorists, and revenge."
—Jon Mercer, University of Washington

Oded Löwenheim is Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
[more]

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Predecessors, Et Cetera
Essays
Amy Clampitt
University of Michigan Press, 1991
Predecessors, Et Cetera collects Amy Clampitt’s reflections on her predecessors (the poets Donne, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and Marianne Moore as well as the novelists Henry James and Edith Wharton) and her contemporaries (including James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, Howard Moss, Thomas McGrath, John Berryman, Stevie Smith, and Seamus Heaney) and reveals the intricate connections inherent in their art. Other essays include “Purloined Sincerity,” which examines the fate of the personal letter in these days of electronic communication, and “The Long, Long Wait,” which looks at the epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians. Along the way she offers ruminations on the poet’s craft, the vagaries of reputation, and the perennial question of what makes a poet – or any writer – tick.
 
[more]

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Predicting Politics
Essays in Empirical Public Choice
W. Mark Crain and Robert D. Tollison, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1990
Predicting Politics: Essays in Empirical Public Choice explores politics in an empirical spirit. The topics covered are novel and important, including the impact of campaign finance on the size of government, the economics of gerrymandering, constitutional change, and budgetary politics. The approach is to formulate and to test interesting hypotheses about political behavior. The essential idea is to illustrate the power of public choice theory in explaining actual politics. The volume brings together the work of Crain and Tollison and other scholars who have worked in this public choice tradition, and shows the power of empirical approaches in explaining the origin and inner working of political institutions and processes.
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Preference Pollution
How Markets Create the Desires We Dislike
David George
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Seldom considered is whether markets do an adequate job of shaping our tastes. David George argues that they do not, and that the standard economic definition of efficiency can be used to demonstrate that the market ignores people's desires about their desires. He concludes that markets perform poorly with respect to second-order preferences, thus worsening the problem of undesired desires. The book further investigates changes in perceptions and public policy toward such activities as gambling, credit, entertainment, and sexual behavior.
David George is Chair and Professor Economics, LaSalle University.
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Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Northwestern Valley of Mexico
The Zumpango Region
Jeffrey R. Parsons with contributions by Larry J. Gorenflo, Mary H. Parsons, and David J. Wilson
University of Michigan Press, 2008
This monograph presents data from a systematic regional archaeological survey carried out over an area of ca. 600 square kilometers during May through December 1973 by the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology.
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front cover of Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Southern Valley of Mexico
Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Southern Valley of Mexico
The Chalco-Xochimilco Region
Jeffrey R. Parsons, Elizabeth Brumfiel, Mary H. Parsons, and David J. Wilson
University of Michigan Press, 1982
Extensive description and analysis of the archaeological settlement data collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the Chalco-Xochimilco Region in the Valley of Mexico.
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Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Upper Mantaro and Tarma Drainages, Junín, Peru
The Tarama-Chinchaycocha Region, Vol. 1, Parts 1 and 2
Jeffrey R. Parsons, Charles M. Hastings, Ramiro Matos M.
University of Michigan Press, 2000
An archaeological study of ancient settlement patterns in Peru’s rugged and diverse central highlands.
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Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Upper Mantaro and Tarma Drainages, Junín, Peru
Volume 2, The Wanka Region
Edited by Jeffrey R. Parsons, Charles M. Hastings and Ramiro Matos M.
University of Michigan Press, 2000
This monograph is based on six months of systematic regional survey in the Wanka Region of Peru’s sierra central, carried out in two field seasons in 1975–1976 by the Junin Archaeological Research Project (JASP) under the co-direction of Jeffrey R. Parsons (University of Michigan) and Ramiro Matos Mendieta (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos).
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front cover of The Prehistoric Animal Ecology and Ethnozoology of the Upper Great Lakes Region
The Prehistoric Animal Ecology and Ethnozoology of the Upper Great Lakes Region
Charles Edward Cleland
University of Michigan Press, 1966
Charles Edward Cleland presents an analysis of the paleoecology and ethnozoology of the Upper Great Lakes from about 12,000 BC to AD 1700, with particular attention to faunal remains found at sites in Michigan and Wisconsin. The nine appendices were originally compiled as faunal reports for archaeological sites in the region.
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front cover of Prehistoric Biological Relationships in the Great Lakes Region
Prehistoric Biological Relationships in the Great Lakes Region
Richard Guy Wilkinson
University of Michigan Press, 1971
In this work, author Richard Guy Wilkinson presents an examination of the biological relationships among certain Middle and Late Woodland populations from the Great Lakes area. He studied the skeletal material from many Midwest archaeological sites, including Juntunen, Younge, Bussinger, Steuben, and Norton Mounds (the largest Hopewellian complex in Michigan). His research attempts to answer questions related to Illinois Hopewellian migration into Michigan; the relationship of Middle and Late Woodland populations in Illinois and the Great Lakes area; and the apparent causes of these relationships.
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front cover of Prehistoric Copper Mining in Michigan
Prehistoric Copper Mining in Michigan
The Nineteenth-Century Discovery of “Ancient Diggings” in the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale
John R Halsey
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Isle Royale and the counties that line the northwest coast of Michigan's Upper Peninsula are called Copper Country because of the rich deposits of native copper there. In the nineteenth century, explorers and miners discovered evidence of prehistoric copper mining in this region. They used those "ancient diggings" as a guide to establishing their own, much larger mines, and in the process, destroyed the archaeological record left by the prehistoric miners. Using mining reports, newspaper accounts, personal letters, and other sources, this book reconstructs what these nineteenth-century discoverers found, how they interpreted the material remains of prehistoric activity, and what they did with the stone, wood, and copper tools they found at the prehistoric sites.   "This volume represents an exhaustive compilation of the early written and published accounts of mines and mining in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. It will prove a valuable resource to current and future scholars. Through these early historic accounts of prospectors and miners, Halsey provides a vivid picture of what once could be seen." —John M. O'Shea, curator of Great Lakes Archaeology, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology
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front cover of Prehistoric Food Production in North America
Prehistoric Food Production in North America
Edited by Richard I. Ford
University of Michigan Press, 1985
As Richard I. Ford explains in his preface to this volume, the 1980s saw an “explosive expansion of our knowledge about the variety of cultivated and domesticated plants and their history in aboriginal America.” This collection presents research on prehistoric food production from Ford, Patty Jo Watson, Frances B. King, C. Wesley Cowan, Paul E. Minnis, and others.
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front cover of The Prehistoric People of the Fort Ancient Culture of the Central Ohio Valley
The Prehistoric People of the Fort Ancient Culture of the Central Ohio Valley
Louise M. Robbins and Georg K. Neumann
University of Michigan Press, 1972
Louise M. Robbins analyzes prehistoric human remains from sites in the central Ohio Valley. She organizes them into five groups and describes the varieties. She also sorts the remains by culture (Baum, Feurt, Anderson, Madisonville). Extensive appendices on metrical and morphological terminology, data, descriptions, drawings, and more.
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front cover of A Prehistoric Sequence in the Middle Pecos Valley, New Mexico
A Prehistoric Sequence in the Middle Pecos Valley, New Mexico
Arthur J. Jelinek
University of Michigan Press, 1967
Arthur J. Jelinek describes the results of his archaeological surveys and excavations in east central New Mexico and provides a prehistoric cultural sequence of the Middle Pecos Valley, from the Paleoindian period to the Late McKenzie Phase. With a contribution on pollen analysis by Paul S. Martin.
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front cover of Prehistoric Settlement Patterns and Cultures in Susiana, Southwestern Iran
Prehistoric Settlement Patterns and Cultures in Susiana, Southwestern Iran
The Analysis of the F.G.L. Gremliza Survey Collection
Abbas Alizadeh with a foreword by Henry T. Wright
University of Michigan Press, 1992
This book reports the results of an archaeological survey undertaken in southwestern Iran by a remarkable researcher: Dr. F.G.L. Gremliza. The author, Abbas Alizadeh, presents Gremliza’s survey data and provides an analysis of the developmental implications.
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front cover of Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Texcoco Region, Mexico
Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Texcoco Region, Mexico
Jeffrey R. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 1971
In this volume, archaeologist Jeffrey R. Parsons presents research based on an extensive 1967 survey of the Texcoco Region in the Valley of Mexico. The sites are organized by time period, from Middle Formative to Aztec. Parsons describes the sites in detail and compares them to those of the same time periods in the Teotihuacan Valley and the Valley of Mexico in general.
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front cover of Prehistoric Social, Political, and Economic Development in the Area of the Tehuacan Valley
Prehistoric Social, Political, and Economic Development in the Area of the Tehuacan Valley
Some Results of the Palo Blanco Project
Edited by Robert D. Drennan
University of Michigan Press, 1979
In this volume, editor Robert D. Drennan presents a series of reports on archaeological research in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexico. Charles S. Spencer writes about irrigation in the Formative period; Elsa M. Redmond reports on a Terminal Formative ceramic workshop; John R. Alden writes about a survey at Quachilco; Drennan provides a preliminary report on excavations at Cuayucatepec; Spencer and Redmond report on Formative and Classic developments in the Cuicatlan Cañada; and Judith E. Smith provides an analysis of carbonized botanical remains from Quachilco, Cuayucatepec, and La Coyotera.
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front cover of Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Deh Luran Plain
Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Deh Luran Plain
An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran
Frank Hole, Kent V. Flannery, and James A. Neely
University of Michigan Press, 1969
In the early 1960s, archaeologists Frank Hole, Kent V. Flannery, and James A. Neely surveyed the prehistoric mounds in Deh Luran and then excavated at two sites: Ali Kosh and Tepe Sabz. The researchers found evidence that the sites dated to between 7500 and 3500 BC, during which time the residents domesticated plants and animals. This volume, published in 1969, was the first in the Museum’s Memoir series—designed for data-rich, heavily illustrated archaeological monographs.
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front cover of Prehistory of the Ayacucho Basin, Peru
Prehistory of the Ayacucho Basin, Peru
Volume II: Excavations and Chronology
Richard S. MacNeish, Angel Garcia Cook, Luis G. Lumbreras, Robert K. Vierra, and Antoinette Nelken-Terner
University of Michigan Press, 1982
Excavations and Chronology is the second of a series of major publications devoted to the archaeology of South America. Richard S. MacNeish has assembled an excellent staff of cooperating scientists for the excavation and interdisciplinary analysis of the Ayacucho Basin, a pristine nuclear site and a region containing the major archaeological, geographical, and ecological units of highland Peru. Supported by the National Science Foundation, MacNeish and his colleagues, in addition to their excavation, collected historical and prehistoric specimens and records documenting the geological, botanical, zoological, and other aspects of the Basin from the past 25,000 years. Future volumes will provide discussions on changes in the prehistorical environment, changes in ceramics and architecture, statistical-computer techniques used in determining ancient human behavior and reconstructing ancient cultural systems and subsystems, and changes in population and settlement patterns and energy flow.
[more]

front cover of Prehistory of the Ayacucho Basin, Peru
Prehistory of the Ayacucho Basin, Peru
Volume III: Nonceramic Artifacts
Richard S. MacNeish, Angel Garcia Cook, Luis G. Lumbreras, Robert K. Vierra, and Antoinette Nelken-Terner
University of Michigan Press, 1980
Nonceramic Artifacts is the first of a series of major publications devoted to the archaeology of South America. Richard S. MacNeish has assembled an excellent staff of cooperating scientists for the excavation and interdisciplinary analysis of the Ayacucho Basin, a pristine nuclear site and a region containing the major archaeological, geographical, and ecological units of highland Peru. Supported by the National Science Foundation, MacNeish and his colleagues, in addition to their excavation, collected historical and prehistoric specimens and records documenting the geological, botanical, zoological, and other aspects of the Basin from the past 25,000 years. Future volumes will provide discussions on changes in the prehistorical environment, excavation techniques and methodology for establishing chronology, changes in ceramics and architecture, statistical-computer techniques used in determining ancient human behavior and reconstructing ancient cultural systems and subsystems, and changes in population and settlement patterns and energy flow.
[more]

front cover of Prehistory of the Ayacucho Basin, Peru
Prehistory of the Ayacucho Basin, Peru
Volume IV: The Preceramic Way of Life
Richard S. MacNeish, Angel Garcia Cook, Luis G. Lumbreras, Robert K. Vierra, and Antoinette Nelken-Terner
University of Michigan Press, 1983
The Preceramic Way of Life is the third of a series of major publications devoted to the archaeology of South America. Richard S. MacNeish has assembled an excellent staff of cooperating scientists for the excavation and interdisciplinary analysis of the Ayacucho Basin, a pristine nuclear site and a region containing the major archaeological, geographical, and ecological units of highland Peru. Supported by the National Science Foundation, MacNeish and his colleagues, in addition to their excavation, collected historical and prehistoric specimens and records documenting the geological, botanical, zoological, and other aspects of the Basin from the past 25,000 years. A future volume will provide discussion on changes in the prehistorical environment, statistical-computer techniques used in determining ancient human behavior and reconstructing ancient cultural systems and subsystems, and changes in population and settlement patterns.
[more]

front cover of The Prehistory of the Burnt Bluff Area
The Prehistory of the Burnt Bluff Area
Edited by James E. Fitting
University of Michigan Press, 1968
The Burnt Bluff area is an archaeological site in Delta County in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There are hundreds of caves and rock paintings along the cliffs on the southern end of the Garden Peninsula, which reaches southwest into Lake Michigan from the mainland. This report describes the results of archaeological research there in 1963 and 1965. Contributions by James E. Fitting, Charles E. Cleland, G. Richard Peske, Donald E. Janzen, Earl J. Prahl, W. R. Farrand, Douglas W. Lugthart, and Volney H. Jones.
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Preparing Adult English Learners to Read for College and the Workplace
Edited by Kirsten Schaetzel, Joy Kreeft Peyton, and Rebeca Fernández
University of Michigan Press, 2024
The ability to read effectively—to work with a text, understand its meaning, and talk and write about it with, and for, others—is a critical aspect of academic and workplace success. However, many adults who are learning English as a second or additional language do not have the skills needed to be successful and may drop out of college and university programs before they reach their goal. Bringing together a rich collection of topics and authors, this edited volume provides theory, research, and instructional approaches to help adult education ESL practitioners work effectively with adult learners and prepare them to be successful with reading in academic and workplace settings. 

After reading this book, adult ESL practitioners will be able to
  • Prepare adults learning English to apply appropriate reading strategies to a variety of academic and professional contexts and purposes
  • Use instructional strategies, including digital technology, to help struggling and developing readers close gaps in skills and conceptual knowledge
  • Improve reading comprehension through robust vocabulary instruction
  • Enhance reading skills and comprehension through writing instruction that balances sentence-level, discourse, and interactive processes and practices
  • Inspire students to become lifelong readers who engage in extensive reading outside of school and professional contexts
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front cover of Preparing Adult English Learners to Write for College and the Workplace
Preparing Adult English Learners to Write for College and the Workplace
Kirsten Schaetzel, Joy Kreeft Peyton, and Rebeca Fernández
University of Michigan Press, 2019
This volume has been written as a response to the new types of communicative demands that the twenty-first century has brought to the workplace. Today’s adult education programs must prepare students to understand complex operations, be problem-solvers, be computer literate, and be fluent in professional English when speaking and writing. As a result, writing has become a bigger need in the field of adult education, and writing instruction must follow suit and extend beyond transactional writing (taking notes, correcting grammar, writing narratives) to rhetorically flexible writing for multiple audiences, purposes, and contexts, whether for a college course or in the workplace. Some of the specific types of writing students need now are the ability to: write argumentative, technical, and informative texts; create, argue for, and support a thesis statement; summarize; write concisely with appropriate vocabulary; produce a well-edited piece understandable to native speakers; and use and credit sources.
 
The volume is organized into four parts: Setting the Stage for Teaching Writing, Supporting the Writing Process, Working with Beginning Writers, and Aligning Writing with Accountability Systems. Chapters are written by current (or former) adult educators with experience across levels. Each chapter introduces an approach based on research that can guide writing instruction and provides specific guidance and tools for implementation. Questions open and close the chapters to guide reading and frame future exploration. JoAnn (Jodi) Crandall has written the Epilogue.

Readers will discover ways to move adults into higher education and careers by helping them be college and career ready, to integrate writing into the existing curriculum in adult education programs at all levels, including content classes, and to teach writing according to national and state standards.
 
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Presence and Desire
Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance
Jill Dolan
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Explores current controversies and significant concerns in feminist theater and performance
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Presence and Resistance
Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance
Philip Auslander
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Examines performance art in the 1980s and new modes of political art in a media-saturated culture
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Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece
Francis M. Dunn
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Francis M. Dunn's Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece examines the widespread social and cultural disorientation experienced by Athenians in a period that witnessed the revolution of 411 B.C.E. and the military misadventures in 413 and 404---a disturbance as powerful as that described in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. The late fifth century was a time of vast cultural and intellectual change, ultimately leading to a shift away from Athenians' traditional tendency to seek authority in the past toward a greater reliance on the authority of the present. At the same time, Dunn argues, writers and thinkers not only registered the shock but explored ways to adjust to living with this new sense of uncertainty. Using literary case studies from this period, Dunn shows how narrative techniques changed to focus on depicting a world in which events were no longer wholly predetermined by the past, impressing upon readers the rewards and challenges of struggling to find their own way forward.

Although Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece concentrates upon the late fifth century, this book's interdisciplinary approach will be of broad interest to scholars and students of ancient Greece, as well as anyone fascinated by the remarkably flexible human understanding of time.

Francis M. Dunn is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of Tragedy's End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama (Oxford, 1996), and coeditor of Beginnings in Classical Literature (Cambridge, 1992) and Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton, 1997).

"In this fascinating study, Francis Dunn argues that in late fifth-century Athens, life became focused on the present---that moving instant between past and future. Time itself changed: new clocks and calendars were developed, and narratives were full of suspense, accident, and uncertainty about things to come. Suddenly, future shock was now."
---David Konstan, John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and the Humanistic Tradition and Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University

"In this fascinating work, Dunn examines the ways in which the Greeks constructed time and then shows how these can shed new light on various philosophical, dramatic, historical, scientific and rhetorical texts of the late fifth century. An original and most interesting study."
---Michael Gagarin, James R. Dougherty, Jr., Centennial Professor of Classics, the University of Texas at Austin

"Interesting, clear, and compelling, Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece analyzes attitudes toward time in ancient Greece, focusing in particular on what Dunn terms 'present shock,' in which rapid cultural change undermined the authority of the past and submerged individuals in a disorienting present in late fifth-century Athens. Dunn offers smart and lucid analyses of a variety of complex texts, including pre-Socratic and sophistic philosophy, Euripidean tragedy, Thucydides, and medical texts, making an important contribution to discussions about classical Athenian thought that will be widely read and cited by scholars working on Greek cultural history and historiography."
---Victoria Wohl, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, University of Toronto

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The President Electric
Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance
Timothy Raphael
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"In this illuminating, multi-pronged cultural and performance history of such phenomena as Chautauqua and radio, movies, and electrical technology, Timothy Raphael puts together a compelling and sometimes revelatory narrative of how commandingly Reagan mastered the matrix of performance, technology, media, celebrity, and the 'republic of consumption' he came of age in."
---Dana Nelson, Vanderbilt University

"Garry Wills and others have written well on the phenomenon of Ronald Reagan, the actor-president, but this is the first book by a real authority---trained in performance and fully reflective about it from the inside . . . unquestionably an important contribution to the disciplinary fields of American studies and performance studies, and an important contribution to public affairs."
---Joseph Roach, Yale University

When Ronald Reagan first entered politics in 1965, his public profile as a performer in radio, film, television, and advertising and his experience in public relations proved invaluable political assets. By the time he left office in 1989, the media in which he trained had become the primary source for generating and wielding political power. The President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance reveals how the systematic employment of the techniques and technologies of mass-media performance contributed to Reagan’s rise to power and defined his style of governance.

The President Electric stands out among books on Reagan as the first to bring the rich insights of the field of performance studies to an understanding of the Reagan phenomenon, connecting Reagan's training in electronic media to the nineteenth-century notion of the "fiat of electricity"---the emerging sociopolitical power of three entities (mechanical science, corporate capitalism, and mass culture) that electric technology made possible. The book describes how this new regime of cultural and political representation shaped the development of the electronic mass media that transformed American culture and politics and educated Ronald Reagan for his future role as president.

Timothy Raphael is Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts and Director of the Center for Immigration at Rutgers University, Newark.

Photo: © David H. Wells/Corbis

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Presidential Accountability in Wartime
President Bush, the Treatment of Detainees, and the Laws of War
Stuart Streichler
University of Michigan Press, 2023
The American presidency has long tested the capacity of the system of checks and balances to constrain executive power, especially in times of war. While scholars have examined presidents starting military conflicts without congressional authorization or infringing on civil liberties in the name of national security, Stuart Streichler focuses on the conduct of hostilities. Using the treatment of war-on-terror detainees under President George W. Bush as a case study, he integrates international humanitarian law into a constitutional analysis of the repercussions of presidential war powers for human rights around the world.

Putting President Bush’s actions in a wider context, Presidential Accountability in Wartime begins with a historical survey of the laws of war, with particular emphasis on the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Tribunal. Streichler then reconstructs the decision-making process that led to the president’s approval of interrogation methods that violated Geneva’s mandate to treat wartime captives humanely. While taking note of various accountability options—from within the executive branch to the International Criminal Court—the book illustrates the challenge in holding presidents personally responsible for violating the laws of war through an in-depth analysis of the actions taken by Congress, the Supreme Court, and the public in response. In doing so, this book not only raises questions about whether international humanitarian law can moderate wartime presidential behavior but also about the character of the presidency and the American constitutional system of government.
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Presidential Elections, 1789-2008
County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data
Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Hanes Walton, Donald Deskins, and Sherman Puckett have produced a highly impressive collection and valuable contribution to the literature on American electoral politics. This work is indispensable for academic libraries, political scientists, historians, and serious students of American government."
---Immanuel Ness, Professor, Department of Political Science, Brooklyn College, City University of New York

"Massive amounts of information about presidential elections which are not readily available elsewhere. Unprecedented coverage in one volume of every single American presidential election."
---James Gimpel, Professor of Government, University of Maryland

"This is an extraordinary research endeavor; the most comprehensive set of aggregate election data ever assembled. Painstakingly researched, this color-coded volume presents data for every presidential election from 1789 to 2008. Unlike most, the wide ranging narrative for this atlas identifies racial patterns in the vote. Everyone who studies or is interested in presidential elections should have this impressive collection of statistical data in their libraries. A visual gem for the digital age."
---Robert Smith, Professor of Political Science, San Francisco State University

"Presidential Elections, 1789-2008 is a genuine tour de force that captures in an extremely accessible and comprehensive way the electoral geography of America's presidential elections, from Washington to Obama. An invaluable addition to the library of all those interested in presidential elections and U.S. politics."
---Marion Orr, Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science, Brown University

"This volume sets an extraordinarily high standard in scholarship, completeness, description, and explanation of our political process. It has been said that all politics are local, but never before has this been demonstrated with such clarity and panache, using the simple method of standardized tables summarizing voting, then showing state and county breakdowns of the numbers, greatly strengthened by beautiful full-color maps and cartograms. Every scholar of politics and democracy will benefit from the work laid out in this volume."
---Keith Clarke, Professor of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara

Presidential Elections is an almanac of the popular vote in every presidential election in American history, analyzed at the county level with histories of each campaign, graphs, and stunning four-color maps. Most Americans are familiar with the crude red state/blue state maps used by commentators and campaign strategists---and even, for want of an alternative, by many academics. In providing a higher-resolution view of voting behavior the authors of this new volume enable examination of local and regional political trends that are invisible in state-level aggregations.

Presidential Elections will enable scholars to more subtly analyze voting behavior, campaigns, and presidential politics; commentators will use it to analyze trends and trace the historical evolution of new coalitions and voting blocs; strategists will use it to plan campaigns and mobilize constituencies. Presidential Elections will become the standard almanac on the subject: a required resource for academic and public libraries, as well as for scholars, consultants, and pundits nationwide.

Donald R. Deskins, Jr., is a political geographer and Emeritus Professor of Sociology and a former Associate Dean of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan.

Hanes Walton, Jr., is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He also holds positions as Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Political Studies and as a faculty member in the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.

Sherman C. Puckett is a Ph.D. graduate of The University of Michigan in urban and regional planning. He was a mayoral appointee in the data processing department of the Coleman A. Young administration in the City of Detroit and recently retired from Wayne County government as manager of technology, geographic information systems, and development of maintenance management systems.
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The Presidential Expectations Gap
Public Attitudes Concerning the Presidency
Richard Waterman, Carol L. Silva, and Hank Jenkins-Smith
University of Michigan Press, 2016

For decades, public expectations of U.S. presidents have become increasingly excessive and unreasonable. Despite much anecdotal evidence, few scholars have attempted to test the expectations gap thesis empirically. This is the first systematic study to prove the existence of the expectations gap and to identify the factors that contribute to the public’s disappointment in a given president.

Using data from five original surveys, the authors confirm that the expectations gap is manifest in public opinion. It leads to lower approval ratings, lowers the chance that a president will be reelected, and even contributes to the success of the political party that does not hold the White House in congressional midterm elections. This study provides important insights not only on the American presidency and public opinion, but also on citizens’ trust in government.

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Presidential Responsiveness and Public Policy-Making
The Publics and the Policies that Presidents Choose
Jeffrey E. Cohen
University of Michigan Press, 1999
We expect a president to respond to public opinion as an elected official in a democracy. Indeed, the president needs public support to overcome opposition to his policies in Congress and the bureaucracy. At the same time the president may want to pursue policies that do not have widespread support. How does public opinion affect presidential policy making? Jeffrey Cohen finds that presidents are responsive to the public in selecting issues to focus on. If an issue has captured the interest of the people, then the president will focus on that issue. Cohen finds that having chosen to work on an issue, presidents pay less attention to public opinion when making a policy. The president will try to maintain control over the details of the policy so that the outcome fits his policy agenda.
Cohen examines the way presidents from Eisenhower through Clinton have dealt with public opinion in policy making. He uses case studies of issues such as Clinton and gays in the military, Bush and the extension of unemployment benefits, and Kennedy and cutting the income tax, to explore the relationship between presidents and public opinion. In addition Cohen uses a quantitative analysis of State of the Union addresses and positions on roll call votes of presidents from Eisenhower through George Bush to test his theories.
This book should appeal to political scientists and historians interested in the presidency and in public opinion, as well as general readers interested in the history of the American presidency.
Jeffrey Cohen is Professor of Political Science, Fordham University.
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front cover of The Press and Main Street
The Press and Main Street
El Pais--Journalism in Democratic Spain
Juan Luis Cebrian, Translated by Brian Nienhaus
University of Michigan Press, 1990
In a nation that had no tradition of free speech, Juan Luis Cebrián has not only established El País as a model liberal newspaper but also made it the measure of Spanish democracy. The Press and Main Street is a collection of essays originally published in Spanish under the title La Prensa y La Calle: Escritos sobre Periodismo. Juan Luis Cebrián is one of Europe's most respected journalist-publishers. He draws on extensive experience in journalism from the period of the Franco dictatorship to the very recent reforms of Spanish society and her entry into the modern European community. Essay topics range from the complexities of operating a free press to the vagaries of letters to the editor and public opinion. Newly included is a chapter written for this edition that compares the press in the United States with that in Spain. All the essays are well-crafted messages of considerable importance to anyone interested in the press, Spain, or the relationship of politics to journalism.
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The Price of Racial Reconciliation
Ronald W. Walters
University of Michigan Press, 2008

“In The Price of Racial Reconciliation, Ronald Walters offers an abundance of riches. This book provides an extraordinarily comprehensive and persuasive set of arguments for reparations, and will be the lens through which meaningful opportunities for reconciliation are viewed in the future. If this book does not lead to the success of the reparations movement, nothing will.”

—Charles J. Ogletree, Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

“The Price of Racial Reconciliation is a seminal study of comparative histories and race(ism) in the formation of state structures that prefigure(d) socioeconomic positions of Black peoples in South Africa and the United States. The scholarship is meticulous in brilliantly constructed analysis of the politics of memory, reparations as an immutable principle of justice, imperative for nonracial(ist) democracy, and a regime of racial reconciliation.”

—James Turner, Professor of African and African American Studies and Founder, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University

“A fascinating and pathbreaking analysis of the attempt at racial reconciliation in South Africa which asks if that model is relevant to the contemporary American racial dilemma. An engaging multidisciplinary approach relevant to philosophy, sociology, history, and political science.”

—William Strickland, Associate Professor of Political Science, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

The issue of reparations in America provokes a lot of interest, but the public debate usually occurs at the level of historical accounting: “Who owes what for slavery?” This book attempts to get past that question to address racial restitution within the framework of larger societal interests. For example, the answer to the “why reparations?” question is more than the moral of payment for an injustice done in the past. Ronald Walters suggests that, insofar as the impact of slavery is still very much with us today and has been reinforced by forms of postslavery oppression, the objective of racial harmony will be disrupted unless it is recognized with the solemnity and amelioration it deserves. The author concludes that the grand narrative of black oppression in the United States—which contains the past and present summary of the black experience—prevents racial reconciliation as long as some substantial form of racial restitution is not seriously considered. This is “the price” of reconciliation.

The method for achieving this finding is grounded in comparative politics, where the analyses of institutions and political behaviors are standard approaches. The author presents the conceptual difficulties involved in the project of racial reconciliation by comparing South African Truth and Reconciliation and the demand for reparations in the United States.

Ronald Walters is Distinguished Leadership Scholar and Director, African American Leadership Program and Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland.

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front cover of Pride, Not Prejudice
Pride, Not Prejudice
National Identity as a Pacifying Force in East Asia
Eunbin Chung
University of Michigan Press, 2022

As shown by China’s relationship to Japan, and Japan’s relationship to South Korea, even growing regional economic interdependencies are not enough to overcome bitter memories grounded in earlier wars, invasions, and periods of colonial domination. Although efforts to ease historical animosity have been made, few have proven to be successful in Northeast Asia. In previous research scholars anticipated an improvement in relations through thick economic interdependence or increased societal contact. In economic terms, however, Japan and China already trade heavily: Japan has emerged as China’s largest trading partner and China as second largest to Japan. Societal contact is already intense, as millions of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese visit one another’s countries annually as students, tourists, and on business trips. But these developments have not alleviated international distrust and negative perception, or resolved disagreement on what constitutes “adequate reparation” regarding the countries’ painful history.

Noticing clashes of strong nationalisms around the world in areas like Northeast Asia, numerous studies have suggested that more peaceful relations are likely only if countries submerge or paper over existing national identities by promoting universalism. Pride, Not Prejudice argues, to the contrary, that affirmation of national identities may be a more effective way to build international cooperation. If each national population reflects on the values of their national identity, trust and positive perception can increase between countries. This idea is consistent with the theoretical foundation that those who have a clear, secure, and content sense of self, in turn, can be more open, evenhanded, and less defensive toward others. In addition, this reduced defensiveness also enhances guilt admission by past “inflictors” of conflict and colonialism. Eunbin Chung borrows the social psychological theory of self-affirmation and applies it to an international context to argue that affirmation of a national identity, or reflecting on what it means to be part of one’s country, can increase trust, guilt recognition, and positive perception between countries.

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front cover of The Primary Rules
The Primary Rules
Parties, Voters, and Presidential Nominations
Caitlin E. Jewitt
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Reflecting on 2016, it might seem that the national parties have little control over how the presidential nominations unfold and who becomes their presidential candidate. Yet the parties wield more influence than voters in determining who prevails at the National Conventions. Although the reforms of the late 1960s and 1970s gave rank-and-file party members a clear voice in the selection of presidential candidates, the parties retain influence through their ability to set the electoral rules. Despite this capability, party elites do not always fully understand the consequences of the rules and therefore often promote a system that undermines their goals. The Primary Rules illuminates the balance of power that the parties, states, and voters assert on the process. By utilizing an original, comprehensive data set that details the electoral rules each party employed in each state during every nomination from 1976 to 2016, Caitlin E. Jewitt uncovers the effects of the rules on the competitiveness of the nomination, the number of voters who participate, and the nomination outcomes. This reveals how the parties exert influence over their members and limit the impact of voters. The Primary Rules builds on prior analyses and extends work highlighting the role of the parties in the invisible primary stage, as it investigates the parties’ influence once the nominations begin. The Primary Rules provides readers with a clearer sense of what the rules are, how they have changed, their consequences, and practical guidance on how to modify the rules of the nomination system to achieve their desired outcomes in future elections.
[more]

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Primitive Polluters
Semang Impact on the Malaysian Tropical Rain Forest Ecosystem
A. Terry Rambo
University of Michigan Press, 1985
In the 1970s, A. Terry Rambo conducted fieldwork in Peninsular Malaysia with a group of Semang people. The community he studied had a seminomadic lifestyle: at times they stayed in houses or lean-tos in a village, and at other times they foraged in the surrounding rain forest for food. Rambo’s goal was to assess this group’s impact on the local environment. He found that, through domestic fires and cigarette smoking, they caused significant air pollution at the household level, but because of their small population size, they did not have much of an ecological impact.
[more]

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Princes and Political Cultures
The New Tiberian Senatorial Decrees
Greg Rowe
University of Michigan Press, 2002
An investigation of the transformation of the Roman state from Republic to dynastic monarchy
[more]

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Principles of Corporate Renewal
Harlan D. Platt
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Since its publication in 1998, this indispensable text has been the only systematic examination of corporate renewal, offering a rational approach for dealing with financially distressed companies. It contains the first logical and orderly discussion of a number of modern business issues including outsourcing, turnaround management, layoffs, quality management, and reengineering.
 
Now in its third edition, Harlan D. Platt has revised, updated, and expanded the text. As the first edition did, this new Principles of Corporate Renewal cuts to the heart of the patterns, procedures, and pitfalls of bringing a corporation back to life and health.
[more]

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Principles of Corporate Renewal, Second Edition
Harlan D. Platt
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Since its publication in 1998, this indispensable text has been the only systematic examination of corporate renewal, offering a rational approach for dealing with financially distressed companies. It contains the first logical and orderly discussion of a number of modern business issues including outsourcing, turnaround management, layoffs, quality management, and reengineering.
 
Now in its second edition, Harlan D. Platt has revised, updated, and expanded the text to include a new chapter on bankruptcy law, a profile of the turnaround manager, and an overview of the typical turnaround engagement. As the first edition did, this new Principles of Corporate Renewal cuts to the heart of the patterns, procedures, and pitfalls of bringing a corporation back to life and health.
[more]

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Printing and Prophecy
Prognostication and Media Change 1450-1550
Jonathan Green
University of Michigan Press, 2011

Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450-1550 examines prognostic traditions and late medieval prophetic texts in the first century of printing and their effect on the new medium of print. The many prophetic and prognostic works that followed Europe's earliest known printed book---not the Gutenberg Bible, but the Sibyl's Prophecy, printed by Gutenberg two years earlier and known today only from a single page---over the next century were perennial best sellers for many printers, and they provide the modern observer with a unique way to study the history and inner workings of the print medium. The very popularity of these works, often published as affordable booklets, raised fears of social unrest. Printers therefore had to meet customer demand while at the same time channeling readers' reactions along approved paths. Authors were packaged---and packaged themselves---in word and image to respond to the tension, while leading figures of early modern culture such as Paracelsus, Martin Luther, and Sebastian Brant used printed prophecies for their own purposes in a rapidly changing society.

Based on a wide reading of many sources, Printing and Prophecy contributes to the study of early modern literature, including how print changed the relationship among authors, readers, and texts. The prophetic and astrological texts the book examines document changes in early modern society that are particularly relevant to German studies and are key texts for understanding the development of science, religion, and popular culture in the early modern period. By combining the methods of cultural studies and book history, this volume brings a new perspective to the study of Gutenberg and later printers.

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The Prism of Race
The Politics and Ideology of Affirmative Action in Brazil
David Lehmann
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Brazil has developed a distinctive response to the injustices inflicted by the country’s race relations regime. Despite the mixed racial background of most Brazilians, the state recognizes people’s racial classification according to a simple official scheme in which those self-assigned as black, together with “brown” and “indigenous” (preto-pardo-indigena), can qualify for specially allocated resources, most controversially quota places at public universities. Although this quota system has been somewhat successful, many other issues that disproportionately affect the country’s black population remain unresolved, and systemic policies to reduce structural inequality remain off the agenda.

In The Prism of Race, David Lehmann explores, theoretically and practically, issues of race, the state, social movements, and civil society, and then goes beyond these themes to ask whether Brazilian politics will forever circumvent the severe problems facing the society by co-optation and by tinkering with unjust structures. Lehmann disrupts the paradigm of current scholarly thought on Brazil, placing affirmative action disputes in their political and class context, bringing back the concept of state corporatism, and questioning the strength and independence of Brazilian civil society.

[more]

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Prismatic Performances
Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation
April Sizemore-Barber
University of Michigan Press, 2021
At his 1994 inauguration, South African president Nelson Mandela announced the “Rainbow Nation, at peace with itself and the world.” This national rainbow notably extended beyond the bounds of racial coexistence and reconciliation to include “sexual orientation” as a protected category in the Bill of Rights. Yet despite the promise of equality and dignity, the new government’s alliance with neoliberal interests and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic left South Africa an increasingly unequal society.
 
Prismatic Performances focuses on the queer embodiments that both reveal and animate the gaps between South Africa’s self-image and its lived realities. It argues that performance has become a key location where contradictions inherent to South Africa’s post-apartheid identity are negotiated. The book spans 30 years of cultural production and numerous social locations and includes: a team of black lesbian soccer players who reveal and redefine the gendered and sexed limitations of racialized “Africanness;” white gay performers who use drag and gender subversion to work through questions of racial and societal transformation; black artists across the arts who have developed aesthetics that place on display their audiences’ complicity in the problem of sexual violence; and a primarily heterosexual panAfrican online soap opera fandom community who, by combining new virtual spaces with old melodramatic tropes allow for extended deliberation and new paradigms through which African same-sex relationships are acceptable.
 
Prismatic Performances contends that when explicitly queer bodies emerge onto public stages, audiences are made intimately aware of their own bodies’ identifications and desires. As the sheen of the New South Africa began to fade, these performances revealed the inadequacy and, indeed, the violence, of the Rainbow Nation as an aspirational metaphor. Simultaneously they created space for imagining new radical configurations of belonging.
[more]

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Prisoner's Dilemma
Anatol Rapoport and Albert M. Chammah
University of Michigan Press, 1965
The term "Prisoner's Dilemma" comes from the original anecdote used to illustrate this game of strategy. Two prisoners, held incommunicado, are charged with the same crime. They can be convicted only if either confesses. If both prisoners confess, their payoff is minus one. If neither confesses, it is plus one. If only one confesses, he is set free for having turned state's evidence and is given a reward of plus two to boot. The prisoner who holds out is convicted on the strength of the other's testimony and is given a more severe sentence than if he had confessed. His payoff is minus two. It is in the interest of each to confess no matter what the other does, but it is in their collective interest to hold out.
There is no satisfactory solution to the paradox of this game. Its simplicity is misleading. What seems rational from your own point of view, turns out to be detrimental in the end.
This book is an account of many experiments in which Prisoner's Dilemma was played. Analyzing the results, one can learn how people are motivated to trust or distrust their partners, to keep faith or to betray, to be guided by joint or selfish interest. The method represents an important step toward building a bridge between psychology which is based on hard data and reproducible experiments and psychology which is concerned with internal conflict.
[more]

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Private Guns, Public Health
David Hemenway
University of Michigan Press
"In this small book David Hemenway has produced a masterwork. He has dissected the various aspects of the gun violence epidemic in the United States into its component parts and considered them separately. He has produced a scientifically based analysis of the data and indeed the microdata of the over 30,000 deaths and 75,000 injuries which occur each year. Consideration and adoption of the policy lessons he recommends would strengthen the Constitutional protections that all of our citizens have to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
-Richard F. Corlin, Past President, American Medical Association

"This lucid and penetrating study is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the tragedy of gun violence in America and-even more important-what we can do to stop it. David Hemenway cuts through the cant and rhetoric in a way that no fair-minded person can dismiss, and no sane society can afford to ignore."
-Richard North Patterson, novelist

"The rate of gun-related homicide, suicide, and accidental injury has reached epidemic proportions in American society. Diagnosing and treating the gun violence epidemic demands the development of public health solutions in conjunction with legislative and law enforcement strategies."
-Kweisi Mfume, President and CEO of NAACP

"In scholarly, sober analytic assessments, including rigorous critiques of NRA-popularized pseudoscience, David Hemenway constructs a convincing case that firearm availability is a critical and proximal cause of unparalleled carnage. By formulating such violence as a public health issue, he proposes workable policies analogous to ones that reduced injuries from tobacco, alcohol, and automobiles."
-Jerome P. Kassirer, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, New England Journal of Medicine, and Distinguished Professor, Tufts University School of Medicine

"As a former District Attorney and Attorney General, I know the urgency of providing safe homes, schools and neighborhoods for all. This remarkable tour-de-force is a powerful study of one promising solution: a data-rich, eminently readable demonstration of why we should treat gun violence as an American epidemic."
-Scott Harshbarger, Former Attorney General of Massachusetts, President and CEO of Common Cause


On an average day in the United States, guns are used to kill almost eighty people, and to wound nearly three hundred more. If any other consumer product had this sort of disastrous effect, the public outcry would be deafening; yet when it comes to guns such facts are accepted as a natural consequence of supposedly high American rates of violence.

Private Guns, Public Health explodes that myth and many more, revealing the advantages of treating gun violence as a consumer safety and public health problem. David Hemenway fair-mindedly and authoritatively demonstrates how a public-health approach-which emphasizes prevention over punishment, and which has been so successful in reducing the rates of injury and death from infectious disease, car accidents, and tobacco consumption-can be applied to gun violence.

Hemenway uncovers the complex connections between guns and self-defense, gun violence and schools, gun prevalence and homicide, and more. Finally, he outlines a policy course that would significantly reduce gun-related injury and death.

With its bold new public-health approach to guns, Private Guns, Public Health marks a shift in our understanding of guns that will-finally-point us toward a solution.


[more]

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Private Guns, Public Health, New Ed.
David Hemenway
University of Michigan Press, 2017
On an average day in the United States, guns are used to kill over ninety people and wound about three hundred more; yet such facts are accepted as a natural consequence of supposedly high American rates of violence. Private Guns, Public Health reveals the advantages of treating gun violence as a consumer safety and public health problem—an approach that emphasizes prevention over punishment and that has successfully reduced the rates of injury and death from infectious disease, car accidents, and tobacco consumption.

Hemenway fair-mindedly and authoritatively outlines a policy course that would significantly reduce gun-related injury and death, pointing us toward a solution.



 
[more]

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Private Sectors in Higher Education
Structure, Function, and Change in Eight Countries
Roger L. Geiger
University of Michigan Press, 1986
Private Sectors in Higher Education examines how the tasks of higher education have been divided between public and private institutions, and with what consequences. In doing so, the author analyzes both the comparative structures of educational systems and their social relations. Besides correcting the widespread misperception that private higher education is predominately an American phenomenon, this study should enlarge the range of experience that can be brought to bear on issues currently facing public policy and private higher education. It constitutes the first scholarly treatment of private higher education outside the United States. Case studies of private sectors in seven countries—Belgium, France, Great Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and Sweden—form the core of this work. This material provides a perspective for probing several underlying rationales for private higher education in the United States. And finally, the author analyzes the issue of government financial support for private higher education. This book should significantly contribute to enlarging the framework of discussion of this question by broadening the understanding of the social and political underpinnings of public/private division in higher education.
[more]

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Privatizing the Economy
Telecommunications Policy in Comparative Perspective
Raymond M. Duch
University of Michigan Press, 1991
During the 1980s government economic policies in the United States and many Western countries promoted the privatization of state-owned activities and the liberalization of competition. This has been the Reagan-Thatcher legacy to contemporary political economy. Privatizing the Economy takes a careful second look at the economic arguments that link government ownership with poor economic performance. Through a rigorous comparative analysis of telecommunications policies in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Raymond Duch shows that it is political control rather than economic ownership that accounts for variations in economic performance. He also provides a political explanation of why privatization has progressed further in some countries than others. Privatizing the Economy strikes a unique balance between economic and political theory, empirical and theoretical analysis, and cross-national and case-study research design. Having identified the weaknesses of economic arguments regarding public versus private ownership, the author proposes an alternative political explanation for the variations in the performance of public and private firms. The author seeks to explain why some governments have adopted liberal economic policies while others have not. The discussion draws upon an extensive political economy literature, pointing out weaknesses of existing theories and suggesting a novel way of looking at policy change. Evidence supporting the author's theoretical propositions comes from two distinct comparative research traditions: cross-national and case-study analyses. This novel way of looking at policy change and the author's broad use of political economy literature offers readers an understanding of what benefits liberal economic policies might deliver and of the likelihood that such policy initiatives might succeed.
[more]

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A Problem Like Maria
Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical
Stacy Wolf
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Subverting assumptions that American musical theater is steeped in nostalgia, cheap sentiment, misogyny, and homophobia, this book shows how musicals of the 1950s and early 1960s celebrated strong women characters who defied the era's gender expectations. A Problem Like Maria reexamines the roles, careers, and performances of four of musical theater's greatest stars-Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Julie Andrews, and Barbra Streisand-through a lesbian feminist lens. Focusing on both star persona and performance, Stacy Wolf argues that each of her subjects deftly crafted characters (both on and offstage) whose defiance of the norms of mid-twentiethcentury femininity had immediate appeal to spectators on the ideological and sexual margins, yet could still play in Peoria.
Chapter by chapter, the book analyzes the stars' best-known and best-loved roles, including Martin as Nellie in South Pacific, Merman as Momma Rose in GypsyAndrews as Eliza in My Fair Lady and Guinevere in Camelot, and Streisand as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. The final chapter scrutinizes the Broadway and film versions of The Sound of Music, illuminating its place in the hearts of lesbian spectators and the "delicious queerness" of Andrews's troublesome nun. As the first feminist and lesbian study of the American Broadway musical, A Problem Like Maria is a groundbreaking contribution to feminist studies, queer studies, and American studies and a delight for fans of musical theater.
Stacy Wolf is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance, University of Texas, Austin.
[more]

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The Problem of the Color[blind]
Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance
Brandi Wilkins Catanese
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"Catanese's beautifully written and cogently argued book addresses one of the most persistent sociopolitical questions in contemporary culture. She suggests that it is performance and the difference it makes that complicates the terms by which we can even understand 'multicultural' and 'colorblind' concepts. A tremendously illuminating study that promises to break new ground in the fields of theatre and performance studies, African American studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, and film and television studies."
---Daphne Brooks, Princeton University

"Adds immeasurably to the ways in which we can understand the contradictory aspects of racial discourse and performance as they have emerged during the last two decades.  An ambitious, smart, and fascinating book."
---Jennifer DeVere Brody, Duke University

Are we a multicultural nation, or a colorblind one? The Problem of the Color[blind] examines this vexed question in American culture by focusing on black performance in theater, film, and television. The practice of colorblind casting---choosing actors without regard to race---assumes a performing body that is somehow race neutral. But where, exactly, is race neutrality located---in the eyes of the spectator, in the body of the performer, in the medium of the performance? In analyzing and theorizing such questions, Brandi Wilkins Catanese explores a range of engaging and provocative subjects, including the infamous debate between playwright August Wilson and drama critic Robert Brustein, the film career of Denzel Washington, Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, the phenomenon of postblackness (as represented in the Studio Museum in Harlem's "Freestyle" exhibition), the performer Ice Cube's transformation from icon of gangsta rap to family movie star, and the controversial reality television series Black. White. Concluding that ideologies of transcendence are ahistorical and therefore unenforceable, Catanese advances the concept of racial transgression---a process of acknowledging rather than ignoring the racialized histories of performance---as her chapters move between readings of dramatic texts, films, popular culture, and debates in critical race theory and the culture wars.

[more]

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Proceedings of the Third Midwestern Conference on Solid Mechanics
Held at the University of Michigan April 1 and 2, 1957
The University of Michigan Press published for The Engineering Research Institute
University of Michigan Press, 1957
These are proceedings from the Third Midwestern Conference on Solid Mechanics, including fifteen papers on properties of viscoelastic media, structural dynamics, stability of rotors, flutter of aircraft components, and structures.
[more]

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Process-Tracing Methods
Foundations and Guidelines
Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Process-tracing in social science is a method for studying causal mechanisms linking causes with outcomes. This enables the researcher to make strong inferences about how a cause (or set of causes) contributes to producing an outcome. In this extensively revised and updated edition, Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen introduce a refined definition of process-tracing, differentiating it into four distinct variants and explaining the applications and limitations of each. The authors develop the underlying logic of process-tracing, including how one should understand causal mechanisms and how Bayesian logic enables strong within-case inferences. They provide instructions for identifying the variant of process-tracing most appropriate for the research question at hand and a set of guidelines for each stage of the research process.
[more]

front cover of The Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno's Dissertation
The Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno's Dissertation
Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed by Process of Nature Within a Solid, Part II
John Garrett Winter
University of Michigan Press, 1916
This English translation of The Prodromus of Nicholaus Steno’s Dissertation is unique in that it includes an introduction and explanatory notes by John Garrett Winter and a foreword by William H. Hobbs. The introduction presents information on Steno’s life and writings, as well as a bibliography of the Prodromus. In his foreword, Hobbs advises readers to “remember that the essay was written near the middle of the seventeenth century, when scientific observation was hardly thought of.” Steno’s description of scientific observation is pioneering for his time and should appeal to those interested in the natural sciences. This volume is a publication of the University of Michigan Humanistic Series.
[more]

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Profiles in Cultural Evolution
Papers from a Conference in Honor of Elman R. Service
Edited by A. Terry Rambo and Kathleen Gillogly
University of Michigan Press, 1991
Presenting diverse viewpoints and topics, this collection includes the following sections:Part I presents a background on the study of cultural evolution. Part II deals with the evolution of complex societies in the tropics of South America. Part III discusses stage sequences and directionality in cultural evolution. Part IV examines the role of prime movers in cultural evolution. Part V discusses diversity and change.
[more]

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Project Management for Researchers
A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized
Shiri Noy
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Learning how to organize and manage research is important for both the researcher and for advancing research. However, graduate students are often trained in theories, methods, and disciplines, but rarely in the organizational, administrative, and metacognitive skills required to manage research projects. Moreover, several disciplines are decrying a reproducibility crisis, with a concerted academic push toward open-access approaches. By clearly organizing research, graduate students and researchers can ensure that they are able to account for their methodological, theoretical,  and other research decisions: to reviewers, to funding agencies, and to support the development of new ideas and exciting offshoots of projects. 

Project Management for Researchers tackles the how, what, and why of project management. It offers step-by-step guidance on choosing tools and developing a personalized system that will help the reader manage and organize their research so that steps and decisions are documented for accountability and reproducibility. Readers will find worksheets they can adapt to their own needs, priorities, and research as well as practical tips on issues ranging from emails to scheduling. Suitable for work across methods, experience levels, and disciplines and adaptable for those working alone, with others, or as team managers, this book will guide readers between various research stages–from planning, to execution, to adjustment of research projects big and small.
[more]

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Projecting History
German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967-2000
Nora M. Alter
University of Michigan Press, 2002

Between 1967 and 2000, film production in Germany underwent a number of significant transformations, including the birth and death of New German Cinema as well as the emergence of a new transnational cinematic practice. In Projecting History, Nora M. Alter explores the relationship between German cinematic practice and the student protests in both East and West Germany against the backdrop of the U.S. war in Vietnam in the sixties, the outbreak of terrorism in West Germany in the seventies, West Germany's rise as a significant global power in the eighties, and German reunification in the nineties.

Although a central tendency of New German Cinema in the 1970s was to reduce the nation's history to the product of individuals, the films addressed in Projecting History focus not on individual protagonists, but on complex socioeconomic structures. The films, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Harun Farocki, Alexander Kluge, Ulrike Ottinger, Wim Wenders and others, address basic problems of German history, including its overall "peculiarity" within the European context, and, in particular, the specific ways in which the National Socialist legacy continues to haunt Germans.

Nora M. Alter is Associate Professor of German, Film and Media Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Florida. A specialist in twentieth-century film, comparative literature, and cultural studies, Alter has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. She is also the author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage.

[more]

front cover of “Proletarian Hegemony” in the Chinese Revolution and the Canton Commune of 1927
“Proletarian Hegemony” in the Chinese Revolution and the Canton Commune of 1927
S. Bernard Thomas
University of Michigan Press, 1975
The Communist aim of proletarian hegemony in the Chinese revolution was given concrete expression through the Canton Commune—reflected in the policies and strategies that led to the uprising, in the makeup and program of the Soviet setup in Canton, and in the subsequent assessment of the revolt by the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party.
“Proletarian Hegemony” in the Chinese Revolution and the Canton Commune of 1927 describes these developments and, with the further ideological treatment given the Commune serving as a backdrop, will then examine the continuing evolution and ultimate transformation of the proletarian line and the concept of proletarian leadership in the post-1927 history of Chinese Communism. [3]
[more]

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Prometheus Reimagined
Technology, Environment, and Law in the Twenty-first Century
Albert C. Lin
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Technologies such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and geoengineering promise to address many of our most serious problems, yet they also bring environmental and health-related risks and uncertainties. Moreover, they can come to dominate global production systems and markets with very little public input or awareness. Existing governance institutions and processes do not adequately address the risks of new technologies, nor do they give much consideration to the concerns of persons affected by them.

Instead of treating technology, health, and the environment as discrete issues, Albert C. Lin argues that laws must acknowledge their fundamental relationship, anticipating both future technological developments and their potential adverse effects. Laws should encourage international cooperation and the development of common global standards, while allowing for flexibility and reassessment.
 

 
[more]

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Pronunciation Myths
Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching
Linda Grant with Donna M. Brinton, Tracey Derwing and Murray J. Munro, John Field, Judy Gilbert, John Murphy, Ron Thomson, Beth Zielinski and Lynda Yates
University of Michigan Press, 2014

This volume was conceived as a "best practices" resource for pronunciation and speaking teachers in the way that Vocabulary Myths by Keith S. Folse is one for reading and vocabulary teachers. Like others in the Myths series, this book combines research with good pedagogical practices.

The book opens with a Prologue by Linda Grant (author of the Well Said textbook series), which reviews the last four decades of pronunciation teaching, the differences between accent and intelligibility, the rudiments of the English sound system, and other factors related to the ways that pronunciation is learned and taught.

The myths challenged in this book are:

§ Once you’ve been speaking a second language for years, it’s too late to change your pronunciation. (Derwing and Munro)

§ Pronunciation instruction is not appropriate for beginning-level learners. (Zielinski and Yates)

§ Pronunciation teaching has to establish in the minds of language learners a set of distinct consonant and vowel sounds. (Field)

§ Intonation is hard to teach. (Gilbert)

§ Students would make better progress if they just practiced more. (Grant)

§ Accent reduction and pronunciation instruction are the same thing. (Thomson)

§ Teacher training programs provide adequate preparation in how to teach pronunciation (Murphy).

The book concludes with an Epilogue by Donna M. Brinton, who synthesizes some of the best practices explored in the volume.

[more]

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Proofs of Genius
Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age
Amanda Gailey
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age is the first extensive study of the collected edition as an editorial genre within American literary history. Unlike editions of an author’s “selected works” or thematic anthologies, which clearly indicate the presence of non-authorial editorial intervention, collected editions have typically been arranged to imply an unmediated documentary completeness. By design, the collected edition obscures its own role in shaping the cultural reception of the author.

In Proofs of Genius, Amanda Gailey argues that decisions to re-edit major authorial corpora are acts of canon-formation in miniature that indicate more foundational shifts in the way a culture views its literature and itself. By combining a theoretically-informed approach with a broad historical view of collected editions from the late eighteenth century to the present (including the rise of digital editions), Gailey fills a gap in the textual scholarship of the editing history of major figures like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and of the American literary canon itself.
 
[more]

front cover of Property Control and Social Strategies in Settlers in a Middle Eastern Plain
Property Control and Social Strategies in Settlers in a Middle Eastern Plain
Barbara C. Aswad
University of Michigan Press, 1971
In this work, anthropologist Barbara C. Aswad presents an analysis of social organization and land control of a Middle Eastern tribal society that has become sedentarized, with particular focus on kinship and marriage and other strategies of mobility. Aswad did her research in villages of the Al Shiukh tribe in southern Turkey along the Syrian border in 1964 and 1965.
[more]

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Prospero and Caliban
The Psychology of Colonization
O. Mannoni
University of Michigan Press, 1990
In his now classic volume Prospero and Caliban, Octave Mannoni gives his firsthand account of a 1948 revolt in Madagascar that led to one of the bloodiest episodes of colonial repression on the African continent. It is in Prospero and Caliban that Mannoni constructs the notion of the “dependency complex,” for which his book has since been remembered and widely discussed in both psychoanalytical and anthropological writing. Prospero and Caliban was one of the first books to challenge traditional approaches to the study of native American societies by Western colonizers and anthropologists; and Mannoni is recognized today for his close association with and influence on the French psychoanalyst Lacan.
 
Noted anthropologist Maurice Bloch has written a powerful and critical new foreword to the English translation, which allows the reader to view Mannoni’s unique work in its historical and intellectual context.
 
[more]

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Protest and the Politics of Blame
The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages
Debra Javeline
University of Michigan Press, 2003
The wage arrears crisis has been one of the biggest problems facing contemporary Russia. At its peak, it has involved some $10 billion worth of unpaid wages and has affected approximately 70 percent of the workforce. Yet public protest in the country has been rather limited. The relative passivity of most Russians in the face of such desperate circumstances is a puzzle for students of both collective action and Russian politics. In Protest and the Politics of Blame, Debra Javeline shows that to understand the Russian public's reaction to wage delays, one must examine the ease or difficulty of attributing blame for the crisis.
Previous studies have tried to explain the Russian response to economic hardship by focusing on the economic, organizational, psychological, cultural, and other obstacles that prevent Russians from acting collectively. Challenging the conventional wisdom by testing these alternative explanations with data from an original nationwide survey, Javeline finds that many of the alternative explanations come up short. Instead, she focuses on the need to specify blame among the dizzying number of culprits and potential problem solvers in the crisis, including Russia's central authorities, local authorities, and enterprise managers. Javeline shows that understanding causal relationships drives human behavior and that specificity in blame attribution for a problem influences whether people address that problem through protest.
Debra Javeline is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Rice University.
[more]

front cover of Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change
Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change
Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders
Ousseina D. Alidou
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders by Ousseina Alidou examines how a new generation of novelists, popular songwriters, and musical performers in contemporary Hausa society are using their creative works to effect social change. This book empathizes with the reality of the forms of oppression, social isolation, and marginalization that vulnerable and underprivileged communities in contemporary Hausa society in Northern Nigeria and the Niger Republic have been experiencing from the mid-1980s to the present. It also highlights the ways in which song performances produce an intertextual dialogue between their lyrics and visual dramatic narratives to raise awareness against social ills, including gender-based violence and social inequalities exposed by biomedical health pandemics such as HIV and COVID-19. In these creative Hausa narratives, the oppressed and marginalized have agency in articulating their own experiences.

While there is an abundance of social science studies giving voice to the dominant actors of hegemonic violence in Hausa society, there is a dearth of works that center the voices of the afflicted, unprivileged, and marginalized class, among whom are women and youth. One aim of this book is to examine the ways popular songs and fiction fill up the humanistic urgency to capture the dignity of the life of those dehumanized by local, national, and international hegemonic religious and secular forces. The book focuses on the resistance narratives of one female novelist and six song composers and performers that generate alternative counterhegemonic responses to dominant patriarchal discourses produced by cultural, religious, and political elites, thus reaching out to marginalized local and national communities and global audiences. Alidou interweaves the social, political, and biomedical epidemics with the concept of “Hausa interiority” to create a unique perspective on contemporary Hausa culture and politics through the lens of artistic productions.
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front cover of Protohistoric Yamato
Protohistoric Yamato
Archaeology of the First Japanese State
Gina Lee Barnes
University of Michigan Press, 1988
Nara is located in the center of what is known today as the Kinai region of Japan. The ancient name for the region was the Go-Kinai ("five-within the royal domain"), referring to the five provinces of which it was composed: Settsu, Kawachi, Izumi, Yamato and Yamashiro. The name Yamato, presented above variously as a provincial unit (corresponding to the present-day Nara Prefecture), or geographical unit (the Nara Basin only), is also sometimes expanded and applied on a regional scale to mean the Kinai region. This is particularly true in scholarship dealing with the fifth and sixth centuries when Yamato was in ascendance.
Therefore, the Nara Basin and its archeology are the keys to unlocking the mysteries of the emergence of Japanese civilization and the early state in Japan. These mysteries are entailed in the earliest recorded history of Japan--references to Japanese island "countries" and "queens" in the Chinese dynastic histories of the third to fifth centuries A.D., and references to "kings" and "emperors" in two late fifth- to early sixth-century sword inscriptions and in the extant chronicles of Japan compiled in the early eighth century.
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front cover of Provincial Soldiers and Imperial Instability in the Histories of Tacitus
Provincial Soldiers and Imperial Instability in the Histories of Tacitus
Jonathan Master
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Tacitus’ narrative of 69 CE, the year of the four emperors, is famous for its description of a series of coups that sees one man after another crowned. Many scholars seem to read Tacitus as though he wrote only about the constricted world of imperial Rome and the machinations of emperors, courtiers, and victims of the principate; even recent work on the Histories either passes over or lightly touches upon civil unrest and revolts in the provinces. In Provincial Soldiers and Imperial Instability in the Histories of Tacitus, Jonathan Master looks beyond imperial politics and finds threats to the Empire’s stability among unassimilated foreign subjects who were made to fight in the Roman army.

Master draws on scholarship in political theory, Latin historiography, Roman history, and ethnic identity to demonstrate how Tacitus presented to his contemporary audience in Trajanic Rome the dangerous consequences of the city’s failure to reward and incorporate its provincial subjects. Master argues that Tacitus’ presentation of the Vitellian and Flavian armies, and especially the Batavian auxiliary soldiers, reflects a central lesson of the Histories: the Empire’s exploitation of provincial manpower (increasingly the majority of all soldiers under Roman banners) while offering little in return, set the stage for civil wars and ultimately the separatist Batavian revolt.

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front cover of Provocative Eloquence
Provocative Eloquence
Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States
Laura L. Mielke
University of Michigan Press, 2019
In the mid-19th century, rhetoric surrounding slavery was permeated by violence. Slavery’s defenders often used brute force to suppress opponents, and even those abolitionists dedicated to pacifism drew upon visions of widespread destruction. Provocative Eloquence recounts how the theater, long an arena for heightened eloquence and physical contest, proved terribly relevant in the lead up to the Civil War. As antislavery speech and open conflict intertwined, the nation became a stage. The book brings together notions of intertextuality and interperformativity to understand how the confluence of oratorical and theatrical practices in the antebellum period reflected the conflict over slavery and deeply influenced the language that barely contained that conflict. The book draws on a wide range of work in performance studies, theater history, black performance theory, oratorical studies, and literature and law to provide a new narrative of the interaction of oratorical, theatrical, and literary histories of the nineteenth-century U.S.
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front cover of The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders
The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders
With Profiles of Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton
Jerrold M. Post, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2005

In an age when world affairs are powerfully driven by personality, politics require an understanding of what motivates political leaders such as Hussein, Bush, Blair, and bin Laden. Through exacting case studies and the careful sifting of evidence, Jerrold Post and his team of contributors lay out an effective system of at-a-distance evaluation. Observations from political psychology, psycholinguistics and a range of other disciplines join forces to produce comprehensive political and psychological profiles, and a deeper understanding of the volatile influences of personality on global affairs.

Even in this age of free-flowing global information, capital, and people, sovereign states and boundaries remain the hallmark of the international order -- a fact which is especially clear from the events of September 11th and the War on Terrorism.

Jerrold M. Post, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry, Political Psychology, and International Affairs, and Director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University. He is the founder of the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior.

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front cover of Psychology and Constructivism in International Relations
Psychology and Constructivism in International Relations
An Ideational Alliance
Vaughn P. Shannon and Paul A. Kowert, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"The conversation between political psychology and constructivism is essential and long overdue. By exploring the interaction of individual cognition and social processes, this 'ideational alliance' more fully explains how ideas work all the way down to shape world politics."
---Theo Farrell, King's College London

"This is a worthwhile and engaging volume. Political psychology is gaining ground as an essential perspective to consider when analyzing international relations, and the book's focus on constructivism provides key insights into the relationship between identity, norms, and behavior---bedrock concepts in understanding the social underpinnings of global politics."
---Mira Sucharov, Carleton University

"An indispensable guide to understanding what distinguishes and what unites psychology and constructivism. A wonderful resource for political psychologists, constructivists, and their critics."
---Jonathan Mercer, University of Washington

Constructivist IR scholars study the ways in which international norms, culture, and identities---all intersubjective phenomena---inform foreign policy and affect the reaction to and outcomes of international events. Political psychologists similarly investigate divergent national self-conceptions as well as the individual cognitive and emotional propensities that shape ideology and policy. Given their mutual interest in human subjectivity and identity politics, a dialogue and synthesis between constructivism and political psychology is long overdue.

The contributors to this volume discuss both theoretical and empirical issues of complementarity and critique, with an emphasis on the potential for integrating the viewpoints within a progressive ideational paradigm. Moreover, they make a self-conscious effort to interrogate, rather than gloss over, their differences in the hope that such disagreements will prove particularly rich sources of analytical and empirical insight. 

Jacket illustration © Ocean Photography/Veer

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Psychophysical Thresholds
Experimental Studies of Methods of Measurement
H. Richard Blackwell
University of Michigan Press, 1953
The studies reported here are primarily concerned with the comparative adequacy of various data collection procedures employed to measure sensory thresholds. In addition, the studies provide evidence concerning systematic differences in threshold data correlated with the use of various data-collection procedures. The data also provide evidence concerning the quantitative character of psychophysical data and the general time order of variability in the threshold.
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Public Office in Early Rome
Ritual Procedure and Political Practice
Roberta Stewart
University of Michigan Press, 2010
". . . [A]n excellent, erudite book."
---Bryn Mawr Classical Review
 
Studies of Roman politics have traditionally emphasized individual personalities or groups of personalities and have explained political behavior in terms of contests for individual power or group power. By contrast, Roberta Stewart focuses on being the religious institution of the "allotment" of duties among elected officials as a primary control on Roman politics. She examines in detail the procedure of allotment, the roles of popular election and allotment in defining public authority and duty, and the relationship between the Roman Senate and elected officials. Allotment is seen to reflect Republican ideology about the divine sanction of Roman leadership, military enterprise, and empire.
 
Allotment is examined in particular historical contexts, and the successive formations of public office in 444, 367, and 242 b.c.e. are analyzed as a series of political solutions in an evolving cultural context. The discussion documents the ritual definition of allotments and the historical development of distinctive features of Republican political office: the equal authority of colleagues (collegiality), the individual authority and accountability for an allotted function (provincia), the procedural alternative to allotment (comparatio), and the hierarchy of offices with imperium (the consuls and praetors).
Public Office in Early Rome will be of great interest for scholars and students of Roman religion, government, and history.
 
Roberta Stewart is Associate Professor of Classics, Dartmouth College.
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front cover of Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, Revised Edition
Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, Revised Edition
Ole R. Holsti
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Thoroughly revised edition of an essential text, incorporating a wealth of new material on American foreign policy since 9/11.

The second edition of this concise masterwork includes vast amounts of new material on American foreign policy in the post-9/11 era, including the war in Iraq. Holsti explores the poorly understood role of public opinion in international affairs, looking at Americans' capacity to make informed judgments about issues far removed from their personal experience.


"Impressively comprehensive and current: an excellent revision of a book by the #1 authority on the topic. This new edition will remain at the forefront for consultation and textbook adoption on the topic for years to come."
-Bruce Russett, Yale University

"I thought the first edition was the best single treatment of the subject-so, apparently, did the student who 'borrowed' my copy-and this is a worthy successor. The new edition almost flawlessly accomplishes the goal Holsti sets for himself: an update of his landmark book in light of emerging research and the dramatically changed state of the world that confronts U.S. foreign policy."
-Randy Siverson, University of California, Davis

"For those who are curious about the impact of 9/11 on American public opinion, for serious students of the relationship between foreign policy and public opinion, for anyone who wants to understand contemporary American opinion about the United States' place in the world, and for citizens tired of conventional wisdom about a difficult and important subject, Holsti's study is not only interesting and topical, it is essential."
-Maxine Isaacs, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

"In an age of almost weekly polling on foreign policy, Holsti's insights are indispensable. He delivers double tour de force in this new edition, providing his own current and historical research along with a comprehensive synthesis of the existing literature. His analysis of the relationships between public opinion and foreign policy since 9/11 will prove particularly valuable for students and scholars alike."
-Richard Eichenberg, Tufts University

"Holsti combines a vast knowledge of political history and a mastery of the relevant scholarship with up-to-date empirical data to address the question of what role the general public can play in shaping foreign policy. This revised edition is a remarkable achievement."
-Shoon Murray, School of International Service, American University
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front cover of Public Response to Peacetime Uses of Atomic Energy
Public Response to Peacetime Uses of Atomic Energy
Volume I: Community Differences
Burton R. Fisher, Benjamin J. Darsky, and Charles A. Metzner
University of Michigan Press, 1951
This is Volume 1 of a study of people, reactions, and information, based on a sample interview survey in comparable communities with and without major atomic energy activities. The study was conducted under contract with the United States Atomic Energy Commission. This volume presents aspects of data obtained from a survey of public reactions and information dealing with peacetime uses of atomic energy. Research methods and study objectives are also discussed, and the book includes an appendix containing the questionnaire used in the study.
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front cover of Public Response to Peacetime Uses of Atomic Energy
Public Response to Peacetime Uses of Atomic Energy
Volume II: Individual and Group Analysis
Burton R. Fisher, Benjamin J. Darsky, and Charles A. Metzner
University of Michigan Press, 1951
This is Volume 2 of a study of people, reactions, and information, based on a sample interview survey in comparable communities with and without major atomic energy activities. The study was conducted under contract with the United States Atomic Energy Commission. This volume presents a detailed analysis of individual and group differences in information, attitudes, and opinions, in contrast to the community correlates. The study should be of interest to social scientists as a snapshot of a social process that had only recently begun.
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front cover of Public Use of the Library  and Other Sources of Information
Public Use of the Library and Other Sources of Information
Angus Campbell and Charles A. Metzner
University of Michigan Press, 1950
This short book presents the findings of a survey on the use of public libraries. The survey was conducted by the Social Science Research Council in 1947 under the auspices of the American Library Association, and conducted. Chapters cover materials housed in libraries, demographic findings on who uses libraries, and data on why patrons use libraries. The final chapter covers more speculative questions posed to the subjects of the study on new, extended services that libraries might offer in the future.
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front cover of Publications of the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Michigan
Publications of the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Michigan
Volume II
Detroit Observatory
University of Michigan Press, 1916
A large reflecting telescope of the Cassegrain form, having an aperture of 37.5 inches and an equivalent focal length of 60 feet, was designed and constructed at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Michigan. More than 3700 spectrograms have now been made, and nearly all the papers in Publications of the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Michigan are based upon data obtained from a small portion of the spectrograms.
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front cover of Publishing Blackness
Publishing Blackness
Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850
George Hutchinson and John K. Young, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2013

From the white editorial authentication of slave narratives, to the cultural hybridity of the Harlem Renaissance, to the overtly independent publications of the Black Arts Movement, to the commercial power of Oprah's Book Club, African American textuality has been uniquely shaped by the contests for cultural power inherent in literary production and distribution. Always haunted by the commodification of blackness, African American literary production interfaces with the processes of publication and distribution in particularly charged ways. An energetic exploration of the struggles and complexities of African American print culture, this collection ranges across the history of African American literature, and the authors have much to contribute on such issues as editorial and archival preservation, canonization, and the "packaging" and repackaging of black-authored texts. Publishing Blackness aims to project African Americanist scholarship into the discourse of textual scholarship, provoking further work in a vital area of literary study.

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front cover of Publishing The Prince
Publishing The Prince
History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism
Jacob Soll
University of Michigan Press, 2010

As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern "absolutist" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread through later editions.

Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters.

Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.

Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski

"Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation."
---Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead

"Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power."
---J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment

"Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history."
---Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley

"Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice."
---Margaret C. Jacobs, American Historical Review

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front cover of The Puerto Rican Population
The Puerto Rican Population
A Study in Human Biology
Frederick P. Thieme
University of Michigan Press, 1959
In this study, author Frederick P. Thieme presents data on biological characteristics of the population of Puerto Rico. He includes data on nutrition, dental status, intestinal infestation, blood types, and more: data he gathered during fieldwork in 1948 and 1949. Thieme’s goals were to set up a baseline as a point of comparison; to study the relationship between physical variability and environment; and to pave the way for establishing medical standards for Puerto Rico.
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front cover of Puffballs and Their Allies in Michigan
Puffballs and Their Allies in Michigan
Alexander Smith
University of Michigan Press, 1951


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