In republican Colombia, salt became an important source of revenue not just to individuals, but to the state, which levied taxes on it and in some cases controlled and profited from its production. The salt trade consistently accounted for roughly ten percent of government income.
In the town of la Salina de Chita, in Boyacá province, thermal springs offered vast amounts of salt, and its procurement and distribution was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance. Focusing his study on la Salina, Joshua M. Rosenthal presents a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the early Colombian state, its institutions, and their interactions with local citizens during this formative period. Although historians have cited the state’s weakness, and in many cases, its absence in local affairs, Rosenthal counters these assumptions by documenting the primary role the state held in administering contracts, inspections, land rights, labor, and trade in la Salina, and contends that this was not an isolated incident. He also uncovers the frequent interaction between the state and local residents, who used the state’s liberal rhetoric to gain personal economic advantage.
Seen through the lens of the administration of la Salina’s salt works, Rosenthal provides a firsthand account of the role of local institutions and fiscal management in the larger process of state building. His study offers new perspectives on the complex network of republican Colombia’s political culture, and its involvement in provincial life across the nation.
A collection of original essays dealing with many aspects of the complex problems of arms control, this volume provides an understanding of the political, strategic, technological, and bureaucratic constraints affecting the development of arms control policies by major powers. Among the diverse subjects examined are American and Soviet interests in arms control, and the rationale for arms control in alternative international systems based upon either bipolarity or multipolarity.
The volume also includes a discussion of the critical technological factors which have important implications for the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), an examination of structural change in the international system, the emergence of additional centers of power, and the implications of SALT for would-be nuclear powers.
Contributors: Robert R. Bowie, J. I. Coffey, James E. Dougherty, Wynfred Joshua, Geoffrey Kemp, Takeshi Muramatsu, George H. Quester, Robert A. Scalapino, Ian Smart, William R. Van Cleave, Thomas W. Wolfe, and the editors.
In this work, the reader experiences the life of Samuel Pepys and his freinds, great and small, in seventeenth-century London. We see great men of war, business and letters, enhanced by Percival Hunt’s comprehensive bibliography.
Immersed in their on-demand, highly consumptive, and disposable lifestyles, most urban Americans take for granted the technologies that provide them with potable water, remove their trash, and process their wastewater. These vital services, however, are the byproduct of many decades of development by engineers, sanitarians, and civic planners.
In The Sanitary City, Martin V. Melosi assembles a comprehensive, thoroughly researched and referenced history of sanitary services in urban America. He examines the evolution of water supply, sewage systems, and solid waste disposal during three distinct eras: The Age of Miasmas (pre-1880); The Bacteriological Revolution (1880-1945); and The New Ecology (1945 to present-day).
Originally published in 2000, this abridged edition includes updated text and bibliographic materials. The Sanitary City is an essential resource for those interested in environmental history, environmental engineering, science and technology, urban studies, and public health.
Winner of:
George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History Urban History Association Prize for the best book in North American Urban History
Abel Wolman Prize from the Public Works Historical Society
Sidney Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology
When the Reverend Henry Carmichael opened the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts in 1833, he introduced a bold directive: for Australia to advance on the scale of nations, it needed to develop a science of its own. Prominent scientists in the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria answered this call by participating in popular exhibitions far and near, from London’s Crystal Place in 1851 to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane during the final decades of the nineteenth century. A Science of Our Own explores the influential work of local botanists, chemists, and geologists—William B. Clarke, Joseph Bosisto, Robert Brough Smyth, and Ferdinand Mueller—who contributed to shaping a distinctive public science in Australia during the nineteenth century. It extends beyond the political underpinnings of the development of public science to consider the rich social and cultural context at its core. For the Australian colonies, as Peter H. Hoffenberg argues, these exhibitions not only offered a path to progress by promoting both the knowledge and authority of local scientists and public policies; they also ultimately redefined the relationship between science and society by representing and appealing to the growing popularity of science at home and abroad.
The role of science in policymaking has gained unprecedented stature in the United States, raising questions about the place of science and scientific expertise in the democratic process. Some scientists have been given considerable epistemic authority in shaping policy on issues of great moral and cultural significance, and the politicizing of these issues has become highly contentious.
Since World War II, most philosophers of science have purported the concept that science should be “value-free.” In Science, Policy and the Value-Free Ideal, Heather E. Douglas argues that such an ideal is neither adequate nor desirable for science. She contends that the moral responsibilities of scientists require the consideration of values even at the heart of science. She lobbies for a new ideal in which values serve an essential function throughout scientific inquiry, but where the role values play is constrained at key points, thus protecting the integrity and objectivity of science. In this vein, Douglas outlines a system for the application of values to guide scientists through points of uncertainty fraught with moral valence.
Following a philosophical analysis of the historical background of science advising and the value-free ideal, Douglas defines how values should-and should not-function in science. She discusses the distinctive direct and indirect roles for values in reasoning, and outlines seven senses of objectivity, showing how each can be employed to determine the reliability of scientific claims. Douglas then uses these philosophical insights to clarify the distinction between junk science and sound science to be used in policymaking. In conclusion, she calls for greater openness on the values utilized in policymaking, and more public participation in the policymaking process, by suggesting various models for effective use of both the public and experts in key risk assessments.
Was Darwin really inspired by Galápagos finches? Did Einstein’s wife secretly contribute to his theories? Did Franklin fly a kite in a thunderstorm? Did a falling apple lead Newton to universal gravity? Did Galileo drop objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Did Einstein really believe in God?
Science Secrets answers these questions and many others. It is a unique study of how myths evolve in the history of science. Some tales are partly true, others are mostly false, yet all illuminate the tension between the need to fairly describe the past and the natural desire to fill in the blanks.
Energetically narrated, Science Secrets pits famous myths against extensive research from primary sources in order to accurately portray important episodes in the sciences. Alberto A. Martínez analyzes how such myths grow and rescues neglected facts that are more captivating than famous fictions. Moreover, he shows why opinions that were once secret and seemingly impossible are now scientifically compelling. The book includes new findings related to the Copernican revolution, alchemy, Pythagoras, young Einstein, and other events and figures in the history of science.
Advancements in computing, instrumentation, robotics, digital imaging, and simulation modeling have changed science into a technology-driven institution. Government, industry, and society increasingly exert their influence over science, raising questions of values and objectivity. These and other profound changes have led many to speculate that we are in the midst of an epochal break in scientific history.
This edited volume presents an in-depth examination of these issues from philosophical, historical, social, and cultural perspectives. It offers arguments both for and against the epochal break thesis in light of historical antecedents. Contributors discuss topics such as: science as a continuing epistemological enterprise; the decline of the individual scientist and the rise of communities; the intertwining of scientific and technological needs; links to prior practices and ways of thinking; the alleged divide between mode-1 and mode-2 research methods; the commodification of university science; and the shift from the scientific to a technological enterprise. Additionally, they examine the epochal break thesis using specific examples, including the transition from laboratory to real world experiments; the increased reliance on computer imaging; how analog and digital technologies condition behaviors that shape the object and beholder; the cultural significance of humanoid robots; the erosion of scientific quality in experimentation; and the effect of computers on prediction at the expense of explanation.
Whether these events represent a historic break in scientific theory, practice, and methodology is disputed. What they do offer is an important occasion for philosophical analysis of the epistemic, institutional and moral questions affecting current and future scientific pursuits.
Few people, if any, still argue that science in all its aspects is a value-free endeavor. At the very least, values affect decisions about the choice of research problems to investigate and the uses to which the results of research are applied. But what about the actual doing of science?
As Science, Values, and Objectivity reveals, the connections and interactions between values and science are quite complex. The essays in this volume identify the crucial values that play a role in science, distinguish some of the criteria that can be used for value identification, and elaborate the conditions for warranting certain values as necessary or central to the very activity of scientific research.
Recently, social constructivists have taken the presence of values within the scientific model to question the basis of objectivity. However, the contributors to Science, Values, and Objectivity recognize that such acknowledgment of the role of values does not negate the fact that objects exist in the world. Objects have the power to constrain our actions and thoughts, though the norms for these thoughts lie in the public, social world.
Values may be decried or defended, praised or blamed, but in a world that strives for a modicum of reason, values, too, must be reasoned. Critical assessment of the values that play a role in scientific research is as much a part of doing good science as interpreting data.
Science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Istanbul, Harun Küçük argues, was without leisure, a phenomenon spurred by the hyperinflation a century earlier when scientific texts all but disappeared from the college curriculum and inflation reduced the wages of professors to one-tenth of what they were in the sixteenth century. It was during this tumultuous period that philosophy and theory, the more leisurely aspects of naturalism—and the pursuit of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”—vanished altogether from the city. But rather than put an end to science in Istanbul, this economic crisis was transformative, turning science into a practical matter, into something one learned through apprenticeship and provided as a service. In Science without Leisure, Küçük reveals how Ottoman science, when measured against familiar narratives of the Scientific Revolution, was remarkably far less scholastic and philosophical and far more cosmopolitan and practical. His book explains why as practical naturalists deployed natural knowledge to lucrative ends without regard for scientific theories, science in the Ottoman Empire over the long term ultimately became the domain of physicians, bureaucrats, and engineers rather than of scholars and philosophers.
Traces the Early Evolution of Britain’s System of Scientific Advice
In twenty-first-century Britain, scientific advice to government is highly organized, integrated across government departments, and led by a chief scientific adviser who reports directly to the prime minister. But at the end of the eighteenth century, when Roland Jackson’s account begins, things were very different. With this book, Jackson turns his attention to the men of science of the day—who derived their knowledge of the natural world from experience, observation, and experiment—focusing on the essential role they played in proffering scientific advice to the state, and the impact of that advice on public policy. At a time that witnessed huge scientific advances and vast industrial development, and as the British state sought to respond to societal, economic, and environmental challenges, practitioners of science, engineering, and medicine were drawn into close involvement with politicians. Jackson explores the contributions of these emerging experts, the motivations behind their involvement, the forces that shaped this new system of advice, and the legacy it left behind. His book provides the first detailed analysis of the provision of scientific, engineering, and medical advice to the nineteenth-century British government, parliament, the civil service, and the military.Seattle, often called the “Emerald City,” did not achieve its green, clean, and sustainable environment easily. This thriving ecotopia is the byproduct of continuing efforts by residents, businesses, and civic leaders alike. In Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability, Jeffrey Craig Sanders examines the rise of environmental activism in Seattle amidst the “urban crisis” of the 1960s and its aftermath.
Like much activism during this period, the environmental movement began at the grassroots level—in local neighborhoods over local issues. Sanders links the rise of local environmentalism to larger movements for economic, racial, and gender equality and to a counterculture that changed the social and political landscape. He examines emblematic battles that erupted over the planned demolition of Pike Place Market, a local landmark, and environmental organizing in the Central District during the War on Poverty. Sanders also relates the story of Fort Lawton, a decommissioned army base, where Audubon Society members and Native American activists feuded over future land use.
The rise and popularity of environmental consciousness among Seattle’s residents came to influence everything from industry to politics, planning, and global environmental movements. Yet, as Sanders reveals, it was in the small, local struggles that urban environmental activism began.
Anne M. Khademian addresses the significance of the SEC for securities policy and uses the agency as a model for the study of bureaucracy and bureaucratic theory. She examines the interaction of bureaucrats, politicians and the White House, and connects early debates in the field of public administration with the contemporary arguments of rational choice scholars concerning independence.
The classic tension within U.S. federal agencies is between the need to hold bureaucrats politically accountable to elected officials and the need to delegate complex decision making to officials with “independent” expertise. In the SEC this tension is especially pronounced because of the agency's dependence on attorneys and economists. Khademian traces the development of a regulatory strategy from the creation of the SEC by FDR in 1934 to the present, examines the roles of SEC experts and their political overseers in Congress as they create policy, and evaluates the stability of that policy. Her study reveals how the tug-of-war between demands for accountability and giving freedom to expertise has affected the agency's evolution and its regulatory activities.
Secret Dialogues uncovers an unexpected development in modern Latin American history: the existence of secret talks between generals and Roman Catholic bishops at the height of Brazil's military dictatorship. During the brutal term of Emílio Garrastazú Médici, the Catholic Church became famous for its progressivism. However, new archival sources demonstrate that the church also sought to retain its privileges and influence by exploring a potential alliance with the military. From 1970 to 1974 the secret Bipartite Commission worked to resolve church-state conflict and to define the boundary between social activism and subversion. As the bishops increasingly made defense of human rights their top pastoral and political goal, the Bipartite became an important forum of protest against torture and social injustice. Based on more than 60 interviews and primary sources from three continents, Secret Dialogues is a major addition to the historical narrative of the most violent yet, ironically, the least studied period of the Brazilian military regime. Its story is intertwined with the central themes of the era: revolutionary warfare, repression, censorship, the fight for democracy, and the conflict between Catholic notions of social justice and the anticommunist Doctrine of National Security.
Secret Dialogues is the first book of its kind on the contemporary Catholic Church in any Latin American country, for most work in this field is devoid of primary documentary research. Serbin questions key assumptions about church-state conflict such as the typical conservative-progressive dichotomy and the notion of church-state rupture during harsh authoritarian periods. Secret Dialogues is written for undergraduate and graduate students, professional scholars, and the general reader interested in Brazil, Latin America, military dictatorship, human rights, and the relationship between religion and politics.
A Penetrating Exploration of the Soviet Secret Police Apparatus
Even more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the secret police in shaping culture and society in communist USSR has been difficult to study, and defies our complete understanding. In the last decade, the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015, has allowed scholars to explore state security organizations in ways not previously possible. Moving beyond well-known cases of high-profile espionage and repression, this study is the first to showcase research from a wide range of secret police archives in former Soviet republics and the countries of the former Soviet bloc—some of which are rapidly closing or becoming inaccessible once again. Rather than focusing on Soviet leadership, The Secret Police and the Soviet System integrates the secret police into studies of information, technology, economics, art, and ideology. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.The discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 eventually led to a craze for radium products in the 1920s until their widespread use proved lethal for consumers, patients, and medical practitioners alike. Radium infiltrated American culture, Maria Rentetzi reveals, not only because of its potential to treat cancer but because it was transformed from a scientific object into a familiar, desirable commodity. She explores how Standard Chemical Company in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania—the first successful commercial producer of radium in the United States—aggressively promoted the benefits of radium therapy and its curative properties as part of a lucrative business strategy. Over-the-counter products, from fertilizers to paints and cosmetics to tonics and suppositories, inspired the same level of trust in consumers as a revolutionary pharmaceutical. The radium industry in the United States marketed commodities like Liquid Sunshine and Elixir of Youth at a time when using this new chemical element in the laboratory, in the hospital, in private clinics, and in commercial settings remained largely free of regulation. Rentetzi shows us how marketing campaigns targeted individually to men and women affected not only how they consumed these products of science but also how that science was understood and how it contributed to the formation of ideas about gender. Seduced by Radium ultimately reveals how innovative advertising techniques and seductive, state-of-the-art packaging made radium a routine part of American life, shaping scientific knowledge about it and the identities of those who consumed it.
“An artist who moonlights as a dentist. A worm who's eternal. A farmer who milks his cow to death. Not to mention the guy with a belly button for an eye. Russell Edson, self-named Little Mr. Prose Poem, returns with See Jack, a book of fractured fairy tales, whose impeccable logic undermines logic itself, a book that champions what he has called elsewhere 'the dark uncomfortable metaphor.' 'What better way to die,' he writes in the final prose poem, 'than waiting for the fat lady to sing in the make-believe of theater, where nothing's real, not the fat lady, not even death . . . ' See Jack may be Edson's best book yet—proof that his imaginative powers keep growing. What a deliciously scary thought!”
—Peter Johnson
During World War I, fear that a network of German spies was operating on American soil justified the rapid growth of federal intelligence agencies. When that threat proved illusory, these agencies, staffed heavily by corporate managers and anti-union private detectives, targeted antiwar and radical labor groups, particularly the Socialist party and the Industrial Workers of the World.
Seeing Reds, based largely on case files from the Bureau of Investigation, Military Intelligence Division, and Office of Naval Intelligence, describes this formative period of federal domestic spying in the Pittsburgh region. McCormick traces the activities of L. M. Wendell, a Bureau of Investigation “special employee” who infiltrated the IWW’s Pittsburgh recruiting branch and the inner circle of anarchist agitator and lawyer Jacob Margolis. Wendell and other Pittsbugh based agents spied on radical organizations from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Camp Lee, Virginia, intervened in the steel and coal strikes of 1919, and carried out the Palmer raids aimed at mass deportation of members of the Union of Russian Workers and the New Communist Party.
McCormick’s detailed history uses extensive research to add to our understanding of the security state, cold war ideology, labor and immigration history, and the rise of the authoritarian American Left, as well as the career paths of figures as diverse as J. Edgar Hoover and William Z. Foster.
Selectivity and Discord addresses the fundamental question of whether there are grounds for belief in experimental results. Specifically, Allan Franklin is concerned with two problems in the use of experimental results in science: selectivity of data or analysis procedures and the resolution of discordant results.
By means of detailed case studies of episodes from the history of modern physics, Franklin shows how these problems can be—and are—solved in the normal practice of science and, therefore, that experimental results may be legitimately used as a basis for scientific knowledge.
Marjorie L. Hilton presents a captivating history of consumer culture in Russia from the 1880s to the early 1930s. She highlights the critical role of consumerism as a vehicle for shaping class and gender identities, modernity, urbanism, and as a mechanism of state power in the transition from tsarist autocracy to Soviet socialism.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russia witnessed a rise in mass production, consumer goods, advertising, and new retail venues such as arcades and department stores. These mirrored similar developments in other European countries and reflected a growing quest for leisure activities, luxuries, and a modern lifestyle. As Hilton reveals, retail commerce played a major role in developing Russian public culture—it affected celebrations of religious holidays, engaged diverse groups of individuals, defined behaviors and rituals of city life, inspired new interpretations of masculinity and femininity, and became a visible symbol of state influence and provision.
Through monarchies, revolution, civil war, and monumental changes in the political sphere, Russia’s distinctive culture of consumption was contested and recreated. Leaders of all stripes continued to look to the “commerce of exchange” as a key element in appealing to the masses, garnering political support, and promoting a modern nation.
Hilton follows the evolution of retailing and retailers alike, from crude outdoor stalls to elite establishments; through the competition of private versus state-run stores during the NEP; and finally to a system of total state control, indifferent workers, rationing, and shortages under a consolidating Stalinist state.
In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony’s residents, primarily disenfranchised former slaves, mestizos, landless farmers, and uprooted Indians, followed a man known as Antonio Conselheiro (“The Counselor”), who promoted a communal existence, free of taxes and oppression. To the fledgling republic of Brazil, the settlement represented a threat to their system of government, which had only recently been freed from monarchy. Estimates of the death toll at Canudos range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand.
Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this monumental event in Brazilian history. In her study, Adriana Michele Campos Johnson offers a close examination of nation building and the silencing of “other” voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, which has become the defining—and nearly exclusive—account of the conflict, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been “sentenced” to history by this work. Johnson investigates other accounts of Canudos such as local oral histories, letters, newspaper articles, and the writings of Cunha’s contemporaries, Afonso Arinos and Manoel Benício, in order to strip away political agendas. She also seeks to place the inhabitants and events of Canudos within the realm of “everydayness” by recalling aspects of daily life that have been left out of official histories.
Johnson analyzes the role of intellectuals in the process of culture and state formation and the ensuing sublimation of subaltern histories and populations. She echoes recent scholarship that posits subalternity as the product of discourse that must be disputed in order to recover cultural identities and offers a view of Canudos and postcolonial Latin America as a place to think from, not about.
Gregory Carleton offers a comprehensive literary and cultural history of sex and society in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. The Bolshevik Revolution promised a total transformation of Russian society, down to its most intimate details. But in the years immediately following 1917, it was by no means clear how this would come about. Sex and sexuality became a crucial battleground for debates about the Soviet future, and literature emerged as a primary domain through which sex could be imagined and discussed.
Despite optimistic claims that bolshevism would overcome bourgeois depravity, the writings of the 1920s in all genres were awash in sexual adventure, promiscuity, various chauvinisms, date and gang rape, unwanted pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as sex-related alcohol abuse, depression, and suicide. In discussions about sex, party officials contradicted themselves, sociologists grappled with difficult social problems, and writers experimented in fictional form with modern identities and relationships.
Drawing on an uncommonly varied body of sources, including novels, journals, diaries, sociological research, public health brochures, surveys, and party documents-many examined here for the first time in English-Carleton reveals the dramatic, bizarre, and intriguing ways the sexual revolution was discussed and represented. Amidst this chaos, he discerns a historical process of codification and reaction, leading ultimately to the quelling of debate in the 1930s through the harsh dictates of Stalinism.
Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia challenges Western writers who portray revolutionary Russia as either prudish or hedonistic by reconstructing a fuller picture of what circulated in Bolshevik culture and why. Carleton brings a complex human dimension to the subject, demonstrating that this controversy should not be viewed as a sideshow curiosity, but rather as a central aspect of the dramatic debates on early Soviet literature and culture.
The profound disruption of family relationships caused by industrialization found its most dramatic expression in the steel mills of Pittsburgh in the 1880s. The work day was twelve hours, and the work week was seven days - with every other Sunday for rest.
In this major work, S. J. Kleinberg focuses on the private side of industrialization, on how the mills structured the everyday existence of the women, men, and children who lived in their shadows. What did industrialization and urbanization really mean to the people who lived through the these processes? What solutions did they find to the problems of low wages, poor housing, inadequate sanitation, and high mortality rates?
Through imaginative use of census data, the records of municipal, charitable, and fraternal organizations, and the voices of workers themselves in local newspapers, Kleinberg builds a detailed picture of the working-class life cycle: marital relationships, the interaction between parents and children, the education and employment prospects of the young, and the lives if the elderly.
Novelist and essayist Hilary Masters recreates a moment in 1940s Pittsburgh when circumstances, ideology, and a passion for the arts collided to produce a masterpiece in another part of the world.
E. J. Kaufmann, the so-called "merchant prince" who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, was a man whose hunger for beauty included women as well as architecture.
He had transformed his family's department store into an art deco showcase with murals by Boardman Robinson and now sought to beautify the walls of the YM&WHA of which he was the president. Through his son E. J. Kaufmann, jr (the son preferred the lowercase usage), he met Juan O'Gorman, a rising star in the Mexican pantheon of muralists dominated by Diego Rivera, O'Gorman's friend and mentor.
O'Gorman and his American wife spent nearly six months in Pittsburgh at Kaufmann's invitation while the artist researched the city's history and made elaborate cartoons for the dozen panels of the proposed mural. Like Rivera, O'Gorman was an ardent Marxist whose views of society were radically different from those of his host, not to mention the giants of Pittsburgh's industrial empire-Carnegie, Frick, and Mellon. The murals were never painted, but why did Kaufmann commission O'Gorman in the first place? Was it only a misunderstanding?
In the discursive manner for which his fiction and essays are noted, Masters pulls together the skeins of world events, the politics of art patronage, and the eccentric personalities and cruel histories of the period into a pattern that also includes the figures of O'Gorman and his wife Helen, and Kaufmann, his wife Liliane, and their son. Masters traces the story through its many twists and turns to its surprising ending: E. J. Kaufmann's failure to put beautiful pictures on the walls of the Y in Pittsburgh resulted in Juan O'Gorman's creation of a twentieth-century masterpiece on a wall in the town of Pátzcuaro, Mexico.
Although a technique for hydraulic fracturing—more commonly known as fracking—was developed and implemented in the 1970s in Texas, fracking of the Marcellus Shale formation that stretches from West Virginia through Pennsylvania to New York did not begin in earnest until the twenty-first century. Unconventional natural gas production via fracking has ignited debate, challenged regulators, and added to the complexity of twenty-first-century natural resource management. Through a longitudinal study taken from 2000 to 2015, Jonathan M. Fisk, Soren Jordan, and A. J. Good examine how the management of natural resources functions relative to specific regulatory actions including inspections, identifying violations, and the use of specific regulatory tools. Ultimately, they find that factors as disparate as state policy goals, elected officials, the availability of data, inspectors, front-line staff, and the use of technology form a context that, in turn, shapes the use of specific regulatory tools and decisions.
Nine noted literary critics examine the spiritual and religious elements in the fiction of such diverse writers as James Baldwin, J. F. Powers, Graham Greene, Par Lagerkvist, and Flannery O’Connor.
Contributors: Robert Boyle, S.J.; Robert McAfee Brown; A. A. Devitis; Herbert Howarth; Maralee Frampton; Nathan A. Scott, Jr.; Albert Sonnenfeld; Winston Weathers; and the editors
One of the most interesting figures to emerge at the turn of the twentieth century was Ambrose Bierce, whose acerbic columns in the San Francisco Examiner spread his fame as America’s most bitter cynic and misanthrope, and whose disappearance into Mexico surrounded his name with an aura of mystery.
Although best known during his lifetime for his journalism and always critical of his own writing—“the magnificent intention mocked by the actual achievement”—Bierce’s fiction endures, especially his short stories about the Civil War. Originally published in the 1890s and rediscovered in the 1920s, the Civil War stories are filled with unsparing descriptions of death and suffering, disillusionment and fatalism. They also show a concern for form and craftsmanship, a controlled irony, and an economy of detail that are distinctly modern.
In this pioneering study of Bierce’s stories, Stuart Woodruff examines the best and worst of Bierce’s fiction with clarity and excellent critical sense, and he traces the causes of Bierce’s success and failure as a writer, analyzing his inability to reconcile the extremes of temperament and belief that marked his life and give his stories their characteristic form.
Among the pieces discussed: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Mocking-bird,” “One of the Missing,” “Chickamauga,” “Haïta the Shepherd,” “What I Saw at Shiloh,” and excerpts from The Devil’s Dictionary and Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.
Singing the City is an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America, using Pittsburgh as a lens. Graham is not blind to the damage industry has done—both to people and to the environment, but she shows us that there is also a rich human story that has gone largely untold, one that reveals, in all its ambiguities, the place of the industrial landscape in the heart.
Singing the City is a celebration of a landscape that through most of its history has been unabashedly industrial. Convinced that industrial landscapes are too little understood and appreciated, Graham set out to investigate the city’s landscape, past and present, and to learn the lessons she sensed were there about living a good life. The result, told in both her voice and the distinctive voices of the people she meets, is a powerful contribution to the literature of place.
Graham begins by showing the city as an outgrowth of its geography and its geology—the factors that led to its becoming an industrial place. She describes the human investment in the area: the floods of immigrants who came to work in the mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their struggles within the domains of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. She evokes the superhuman aura of making steel by taking the reader to still functioning mills and uncovers for us a richness of tradition in ethnic neighborhoods that survives to this day.
Gerald Jacob views the history of public policy regarding nuclear waste, culminating in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy act and its aftermath. The 1982 act promised a solution, but Jacob believes it deferred to the interests of the nuclear utilities and the U.S. Department of Energy. He describes how the nuclear establishment used science and geography to protect its interests and dominate nuclear waste policy making. He examines the federal promotion of nuclear power, and asserts that federal policies strong-armed public opposition, and locked the country into a single, but flawed waste disposal solution.
In five parts, the book first examines the personal essentials demanded by dance. The second part looks at the pitfalls inherent in the act of performing from vanity to self-hatred. The third part, the core of the book, poses six questions: Who? is doing what? to whom? where and when? and why? and against what obstacle? In the fourth part, Nagrin looks at the tools for working on the role, and the fifth part enters into the very act of performing. All of the work is handled in terms of movement alone: no dialogue or scenes from plays are used.
The Six Questions is a companion piece to Nagrin's other works, How To Dance Forever, and Dance and the Specific Image: Improvisation. Together they present an invaluable teaching and learning tool for anyone in love with dance.
Slave Emancipation in Cuba is the classic study of the end of slavery in Cuba. Rebecca J. Scott explores the dynamics of Cuban emancipation, arguing that slavery was not simply abolished by the metropolitan power of Spain or abandoned because of economic contradictions. Rather, slave emancipation was a prolonged, gradual and conflictive process unfolding through a series of social, legal, and economic transformations.
Scott demonstrates that slaves themselves helped to accelerate the elimination of slavery. Through flight, participation in nationalist insurgency, legal action, and self-purchase, slaves were able to force the issue, helping to dismantle slavery piece by piece. With emancipation, former slaves faced transformed, but still very limited, economic options. By the end of the nineteenth-century, some chose to join a new and ultimately successful rebellion against Spanish power.
In a new afterword, prepared for this edition, the author reflects on the complexities of postemancipation society, and on recent developments in historical methodology that make it possible to address these questions in new ways.
Winner, 2022 SSA Best Book Prize
The so-called Slovak question asked what place Slovaks held—or should have held—in the former state of Czechoslovakia. Formed in 1918 at the end of World War I from the remains of the Hungarian Empire, and reformed after ceasing to exist during World War II, the country would eventually split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the “Velvet Divorce” in 1993.
In the meantime, the minority Slovaks often clashed with the majority Czechs over their role in the nation. The Slovak Question examines this debate from a transatlantic perspective. Explored through the relationship between Slovaks, Americans of Slovak heritage, and United States and Czechoslovakian policymakers, it shows how Slovak national activism in America helped the Slovaks establish a sense of independent identity and national political assertion after World War I. It also shows how Slovak American leaders influenced US policy by conceptualizing the United States and Slovakia as natural allies due to their connections through immigration. This process played a critical role in undermining attempts to establish a united Czechoslovakian identity and instead caused a divide between the two groups, which was exploited by Nazi Germany and then by other actors during the Cold War, and proved ultimately to be insurmountable.
Social Change in Contemporary China offers a wide-ranging examination of Chinese institutional change in areas of education, religion, health care, economics, labor, family, and local communities in the post-Mao era. Based on the pioneering work of sociologist C. K. Yang (1911–1999), and his institutional diffusion theory, the essays analyze and develop the theory as it applies to both public and private institutions. The interrelationship of these institutions composes what Yang termed the Chinese “system,” and affects nearly every aspect of life. Yang examined the influence of external factors on each institution, such as the influence of Westernization and Communism on family, and the impact of industrialization on rural markets. He also analyzed the impact of public opinion and past culture on institutions, therein revealing the circular nature of diffusion. Perhaps most significant are Yang’s insights on the role of religion in Chinese society. Despite the common perception that China had no religion, he uncovers the influence of classical Confucianism as the basis for many ethical value systems, and follows its diffusion into state and kinship systems, as well as Taoism and Buddhism.
Writing in the early years of Communism, Yang had little hard data with which to test his theories. The contributors to this volume expand upon Yang’s groundbreaking approach and apply the model of diffusion to a rapidly evolving contemporary China, providing a window into an increasingly modern Chinese society and its institutions.
The Swedish Social Democratic Party, the SAP, is the most successful social democratic party in the world. It has led the government for most of the last six decades, participating either alone or as the dominant force in coalition government. The SAP has also worked closely with trade unions that have organized nearly 85 percent of the labor force, the highest rate among the advanced industrial democracies. Rarely has a political party been so dominant or so closely linked to labor movement. Yet Sweden remains very much a capitolist society with economic and social power firmly in the hands of big capitol.
If one wants to know if politics, and most especially if reformist politics, matters - if, that is, political mobilization can change democratic capitolists societies - then Sweden under the Social Democrats is clearly one of the best empirical cases to study.
Bo Rothstein uses the Swedish experience to analyze the limits a social democratic government labors under and the possibilities it enjoys in using the state to implement large-scale social change. He examines closely two SAP programs, one a success and the other a failure, that attempted to change social processes deeply embedded in capitolist society. He ties the outcomes of these programs to the structure of the state and hypothesizes that the outcome depends, to a considerable extent, on how administrative apparatuses responsible for implementing each policy are organized. Rothstein concludes that no matter how wisely a reformist policy is designed nor how strong the political party behind it, if the administrative arrangements are faulty, it will fail at the stage of implementation.
Rothstein convincingly demonstrates that the democratic capitolist countries of the world have important lessons to learn from the Swedish experience regarding the possibilities for political reform. Political scientists and political reformers alike can learn much from Rothstein’s deep knowledge of Swedish government and his innovative model for analyzing political reform in social democratic societies.
The Soviets are often viewed as insatiable industrialists who saw nature as a force to be tamed and exploited. Song of the Forest counters this assumption, uncovering significant evidence of Soviet conservation efforts in forestry, particularly under Josef Stalin. In his compelling study, Stephen Brain profiles the leading Soviet-era conservationists, agencies, and administrators, and their efforts to formulate forest policy despite powerful ideological differences.
By the time of the revolution of 1905, modern Russian forestry science had developed an influential romantic strand, especially prevalent in the work of Georgii Morozov, whose theory of “stand types” asked forest managers to consider native species and local conditions when devising plans for regenerating forests. After their rise to power, the Bolsheviks turned their backs on this tradition and adopted German methods, then considered the most advanced in the world, for clear-cutting and replanting of marketable tree types in “artificial forests.” Later, when Stalin’s Five Year Plan required vast amounts of timber for industrialization, forest radicals proposed “flying management,” an exaggerated version of German forestry where large tracts of virgin forest would be clear-cut. Opponents who still upheld Morozov’s vision favored a conservative regenerating approach, and ultimately triumphed by establishing the world’s largest forest preserve.
Another radical turn came with the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature, implemented in 1948. Narrow “belts” of new forest planted on the vast Russian steppe would block drying winds, provide cool temperatures, trap moisture, and increase crop production. Unfortunately, planters were ordered to follow the misguided methods of the notorious Trofim Lysenko, and the resulting yields were abysmal. But despite Lysenko, agency infighting, and an indifferent peasant workforce, Stalin’s forestry bureaus eventually succeeded in winning many environmental concessions from industrial interests. In addition, the visionary teachings of Morozov found new life, ensuring that the forest’s song did not fall upon deaf ears.
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