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The Cancer Stage of Capitalism
From Crisis to Cure
John McMurtry
Pluto Press, 2013

The Cancer Stage of Capitalism is a modern classic of critical philosophy and political economy, renowned for its depth and comprehensive research. It provides a step by step diagnosis of the continuing economic collapse in the US and Europe and has had an enormous influence on new visions of economic alternatives.

John McMurtry argues that our world disorder of unending crises is the predictable result of a cancerous economic system multiplying out of all control and destroying ecological, social and organic life - a process he describes as 'global ecogenocide'. In this updated edition he explains the ‘social immune response’ required to fight the ‘macro cancer’, something which has already been shown in developments such as the Occupy movement and the democratic social transformation of Latin America.

In an official global culture increasingly destructive of life, this book shows the necessity and possibility of building a sustainable society based on a universal commitment to life and nature.

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Capitalizing on Crisis
The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance
Greta R. Krippner
Harvard University Press, 2011

In the context of the recent financial crisis, the extent to which the U.S. economy has become dependent on financial activities has been made abundantly clear. In Capitalizing on Crisis, Greta Krippner traces the longer-term historical evolution that made the rise of finance possible, arguing that this development rested on a broader transformation of the U.S. economy than is suggested by the current preoccupation with financial speculation.

Krippner argues that state policies that created conditions conducive to financialization allowed the state to avoid a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas that confronted policymakers as postwar prosperity stalled beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, the financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state’s attempts to solve other problems. The book focuses on deregulation of financial markets during the 1970s and 1980s, encouragement of foreign capital into the U.S. economy in the context of large fiscal imbalances in the early 1980s, and changes in monetary policy following the shift to high interest rates in 1979.

Exhaustively researched, the book brings extensive new empirical evidence to bear on debates regarding recent developments in financial markets and the broader turn to the market that has characterized U.S. society over the last several decades.

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The Charismatic Bond
Political Behavior in Time of Crisis
Douglas Madsen and Peter Snow
Harvard University Press, 1991
Here is a book that takes up where Max Weber left off in his study of charisma and extends the theory with insights from other disciplines and new empirical data. Douglas Madsen and Peter Snow demonstrate that magnetic personalities must have willing followers, finding support for their argument in the rise of Juan Perón and the Peronistas in Argentina.
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Cherokee Women In Crisis
Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 1838-1907
Carolyn Johnston
University of Alabama Press, 2003
Explains how traditional Cherokee women’s roles were destabilized, modified, recovered, and in some ways strengthened during three periods of great turmoil

American Indian women have traditionally played vital roles in social hierarchies at the family, clan, and tribal levels. In the Cherokee Nation, specifically, women and men are considered equal contributors to the culture. With this study, however, we learn that three key historical events in the 19th and early 20th centuries—removal, the Civil War, and allotment of their lands—forced a radical renegotiation of gender roles and relations in Cherokee society.

Carolyn Johnston (who is related to John Ross, principal chief of the Nation) looks at how Cherokee women navigated these crises in ways that allowed them to retain their traditional assumptions, ceremonies, and beliefs and to thereby preserve their culture. In the process, they both lost and retained power. The author sees a poignant irony in the fact that Europeans who encountered Native societies in which women had significant power attempted to transform them into patriarchal ones and that American women struggled for hundreds of years to achieve the kind of equality that Cherokee women had enjoyed for more than a millennium.

Johnston examines the different aspects of Cherokee women’s power: authority in the family unit and the community, economic independence, personal autonomy, political clout, and spirituality. Weaving a great-grandmother theme throughout the narrative, she begins with the protest of Cherokee women against removal and concludes with the recovery of the mother town of Kituwah and the elections of Wilma Mankiller and Joyce Dugan as principal chiefs of the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokees.
 
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China in Crisis, Volume 2
China's Policies in Asia and America's Alternatives
Edited by Tang Tsou and Ping-ti Ho
University of Chicago Press, 1968
The continuing debate in the United States over policies toward China and Vietnam provides the compelling occasion for reexamining the objectives and capability of Communist China and her relations with major countries in Asia.
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Citizenship and Crisis
Arab Detroit After 9/11
Detroit Arab American Study Group
Russell Sage Foundation, 2009
Is citizenship simply a legal status or does it describe a sense of belonging to a national community? For Arab Americans, these questions took on new urgency after 9/11, as the cultural prejudices that have often marginalized their community came to a head. Citizenship and Crisis reveals that, despite an ever-shifting definition of citizenship and the ease with which it can be questioned in times of national crisis, the Arab communities of metropolitan Detroit continue to thrive. A groundbreaking study of social life, religious practice, cultural values, and political views among Detroit Arabs after 9/11, Citizenship and Crisis argues that contemporary Arab American citizenship and identity have been shaped by the chronic tension between social inclusion and exclusion that has been central to this population's experience in America. According to the landmark Detroit Arab American Study, which surveyed more than 1,000 Arab Americans and is the focus of this book, Arabs express pride in being American at rates higher than the general population. In nine wide-ranging essays, the authors of Citizenship and Crisis argue that the 9/11 backlash did not substantially transform the Arab community in Detroit, nor did it alter the identities that prevail there. The city's Arabs are now receiving more mainstream institutional, educational, and political support than ever before, but they remain a constituency defined as essentially foreign. The authors explore the role of religion in cultural integration and identity formation, showing that Arab Muslims feel more alienated from the mainstream than Arab Christians do. Arab Americans adhere more strongly to traditional values than do other Detroit residents, regardless of religion. Active participants in the religious and cultural life of the Arab American community attain higher levels of education and income, yet assimilation to the American mainstream remains important for achieving enduring social and political gains. The contradictions and dangers of being Arab and American are keenly felt in Detroit, but even when Arab Americans oppose U.S. policies, they express more confidence in U.S. institutions than do non-Arabs in the general population. The Arabs of greater Detroit, whether native-born, naturalized, or permanent residents, are part of a political and historical landscape that limits how, when, and to what extent they can call themselves American. When analyzed against this complex backdrop, the results of The Detroit Arab American Study demonstrate that the pervasive notion in American society that Arabs are not like "us" is simply inaccurate. Citizenship and Crisis makes a rigorous and impassioned argument for putting to rest this exhausted cultural and political stereotype.
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The City on the Hill From Below
The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics
Authored by Stephen Marshall
Temple University Press, 2012

Within the discipline of American political science and the field of political theory, African American prophetic political critique as a form of political theorizing has been largely neglected. Stephen Marshall, in The City on the Hill from Below, interrogates the political thought of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison to reveal a vital tradition of American political theorizing and engagement with an American political imaginary forged by the City on the Hill.

Originally articulated to describe colonial settlement, state formation, and national consolidation, the image of the City on the Hill has been transformed into one richly suited to assessing and transforming American political evil. The City on the Hill from Below shows how African American political thinkers appropriated and revised languages of biblical prophecy and American republicanism.

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Civil Wars
Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism
George C. Rable
University of Illinois Press, 1989
Born into a male-dominated society, southern women often chose to support patriarchy and their own celebrated roles as mothers, wives, and guardians of the home and humane values. George C. Rable uncovers the details of how women fit into the South's complex social order and how Southern social assumptions shaped their attitudes toward themselves, their families, and society as a whole. He reveals a bafflingly intricate social order and the ways the South's surprisingly diverse women shaped their own lives and minds despite strict boundaries. Paying particular attention to women during the Civil War, Roble illuminates their thoughts on the conflict and the threats and challenges they faced and looks at their place in both the economy and politics of the Confederacy. He also ranges back to the antebellum era and forward to postwar South, when women quickly acquiesced to the old patriarchal system but nonetheless lived lives changed forever by the war.

Winner of the 1989 Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the Confederacy, 1989.  Winner of the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize of the Southern Association of Women Historians, 1991.
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The Colorado Trail in Crisis
A Naturalist’s Field Report on Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems
Karl Ford
University Press of Colorado, 2024
The Colorado Trail in Crisis addresses the sweeping transformation of western forests and wilderness ecosystems affected by climate change. This book is equal parts trail journal and synthesis of natural and human history. Karl Ford uses research on climate impacts to forests, wildlife, hydrology, and more to stress the urgent need for an action plan to reduce greenhouse gases and save forests and watersheds.
 
Using his hike along the popular five-hundred-mile Colorado Trail to present his personal observations about more than a hundred miles of dead and dying forest, Karl Ford presents a brief environmental history of these areas of the state, weaving in scientific studies about forest mortality caused by insect infestations, wildfire, drought, and loss of snowpack, and describes the poor current prospects for reforestation as the climate continues to warm. His own Lakota ancestry, as well as historical references to local Tabeguache Ute Chief Ouray and displaced Ute populations, meaningfully frames important conversations about caretaking and connection to place. Ford also proposes potential solutions to drought and forest mortality problems, as well as varying approaches and limitations to mitigation efforts.
 
The Colorado Trail in Crisis appeals to hikers and nature lovers seeking to learn about the natural history, beauty, and serenity of the Colorado Trail, as well as students, conservationists, and scientists researching climate change effects on Colorado mountain ecosystems.
 
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Composition in the Twenty-First Century
Crisis and Change
Edited by Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997
The essays in this book, stemming from a national conference of the same name, focus on the single subject required of nearly all college students—composition.

Despite its pervasiveness and its significance, composition has an unstable status within the curriculum. Writing programs and writing faculty are besieged by academic, political, and financial concerns that have not been well understood or addressed.

At many institutions, composition functions paradoxically as both the gateway to academic success and as the gatekeeper, reducing access to academic work and opportunity for those with limited facility in English. Although writing programs are expected to provide services that range from instruction in correct grammar to assisting—or resisting—political correctness, expanding programs and shrinking faculty get caught in the crossfire. The bottom line becomes the firing line as forces outside the classroom determine funding and seek to define what composition should do.

In search of that definition, the contributors ask and answer a series of specific and salient questions: What implications—intellectual, political, and institutional—will forces outside the classroom have on the quality and delivery of composition in the twenty-first century? How will faculty and administrators identify and address these issues? What policies and practices ought we propose for the century to come?

This book features sixteen position papers by distinguished scholars and researchers in composition and rhetoric; most of the papers are followed by invited responses by other notable compositionists. In all, twenty-five contributors approach composition from a wide variety of contemporary perspectives: rhetorical, historical, social, cultural, political, intellectual, economic, structural, administrative, and developmental. They propose solutions applicable to pedagogy, research, graduate training of composition teachers, academic administration, and public and social policy. In a very real sense, then, this is the only book to offer a map to the future of composition.

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The Concept in Crisis
Reading Capital Today
Nick Nesbitt, editor
Duke University Press, 2017
The publication of Reading Capital—by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière—in 1965 marked a key intervention in Marxist philosophy and critical theory, bringing forth a stunning array of concepts that continue to inspire philosophical reflection of the highest magnitude. The Concept in Crisis reconsiders the volume’s reading of Marx and renews its call for a critique of capitalism and culture for the twenty-first century. The contributors—who include Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, and Fernanda Navarro—interrogate Althusser's contributions in particular within the context of what is surely the most famous collective reading of Marx ever undertaken. Among other topics, they offer a symptomatic critique of Althusser; consider his writing as a materialist production of knowledge; analyze the volume’s conceptualization of value and crisis; examine how leftist Latin American leaders like Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos engaged with Althusser and Reading Capital; and draw out the volume's implications and use for feminist theory and praxis. Retrieving the inspiration that drove Althusser's reinterpretation of Marx, The Concept in Crisis explains why Reading Capital's revolutionary inflection retains its critical appeal, prompting readers to reconsider Marx's relevance in an era of neoliberal capitalism.

Contributors. Emily Apter, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Adrian Johnston, Warren Montag, Fernanda Navarro, Nick Nesbitt, Knox Peden, Nina Power, Robert J. C. Young
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Conflict and Crisis
The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945-1948
Robert J. Donovan
University of Missouri Press, 1996

“It was a quiet on the second floor. The vice-president walked solemnly into Mrs. Roosevelt’s sitting room, where she waited, grave and calm. With her was her daughter, Mrs. Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, her husband, Colonel John Boettiger, and Stephan Early. Truman knew at a glance that his premonition had been true. Mrs. Roosevelt came forward directly and put her arm on his shoulder.

‘Harry, the President is dead.’”

Robert J. Donovan’s Conflict and Crisis presents a detailed account of Harry S. Truman’s presidency from 1945-1948.

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Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s
Paul Finkelman
Ohio University Press, 2011

During the long decade from 1848 to 1861 America was like a train speeding down the track, without an engineer or brakes. The new territories acquired from Mexico had vastly increased the size of the nation, but debate over their status—and more importantly the status of slavery within them—paralyzed the nation. Southerners gained access to the territories and a draconian fugitive slave law in the Compromise of 1850, but this only exacerbated sectional tensions. Virtually all northerners, even those who supported the law because they believed that it would preserve the union, despised being turned into slave catchers. In 1854, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Congress repealed the ban on slavery in the remaining unorganized territories. In 1857, in the Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court held that all bans on slavery in the territories were unconstitutional. Meanwhile, northern whites, free blacks, and fugitive slaves resisted the enforcement of the 1850 fugitive slave law. In Congress members carried weapons and Representative Preston Brooks assaulted Senator Charles Sumner with a cane, nearly killing him. This was the decade of the 1850s and these were the issues Congress grappled with.

This volume of new essays examines many of these issues, helping us better understand the failure of political leadership in the decade that led to the Civil War.


Contributors
Spencer R. Crew
Paul Finkelman
Matthew Glassman
Amy S. Greenberg
Martin J. Hershock
Michael F. Holt
Brooks D. Simpson
Jenny Wahl

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Contesting Cosmopolitan Europe
Euroscepticism, Crisis and Borders
James Foley
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The project of European integration has undergone a succession of shocks, beginning with the Eurozone crisis, followed by reactions to the sudden growth of irregular migration, and, most recently, the Coronavirus pandemic. These shocks have politicised questions related to the governance of borders and markets that for decades had been beyond the realm of contestation. For some time, these questions have been spilling over into domestic and European electoral politics, with the rise of “populist” and Eurosceptic parties. Increasingly, however, the crises have begun to reshape the liberal narrative that have been central to the European project. This book charts the rise of contestation over the meaning of “Europe”, particularly in light of the Coronavirus crisis and Brexit. Drawing together cutting edge, interdisciplinary scholarship from across the continent, it questions not merely the traditional conflict between European and nationalist politics, but the impact of contestation on the assumed “cosmopolitan” values of Europe.
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Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya
The Dialectic of Domination
Bruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1990

This history of the political economy of Kenya is the first full length study of the development of the colonial state in Africa.

Professor Berman argues that the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies.

This dialectic of domination resulted in both the uneven transformation of indigenous societies and in the reconstruction of administrative control in the inter-war period.

The study traces the evolution of the colonial state from its skeletal beginnings in the 1890s to the complex bureaucracy of the post-1945 era which managed the growing integration of the colony with international capital. These contradictions led to the political crisis of the Mau Mau emergency in 1952 and to the undermining of the colonial state.

The book is based on extensive primary sources including numerous interviews with Kenyan and British participants. The analysis moves from the micro-level of the relationship of the District Commissioners and the African population to the macro-level of the state and the political economy of colonialism.

Professor Berman uses the case of Kenya to make a sophisticated contribution to the theory of the state and to the understanding of the dynamics of the development of modern African political and economic institutions.

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Coping with Crisis
Government Reactions to the Great Recession
Nancy Bermeo
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
The financial crisis that erupted on Wall Street in 2008 quickly cascaded throughout much of the advanced industrial world. Facing the specter of another Great Depression, policymakers across the globe responded in sharply different ways to avert an economic collapse. Why did the response to the crisis—and its impact on individual countries—vary so greatly among interdependent economies? How did political factors like public opinion and domestic interest groups shape policymaking in this moment of economic distress? Coping with Crisis offers a rigorous analysis of the choices societies made as a devastating global economic crisis unfolded. With an ambitiously broad range of inquiry, Coping with Crisis examines the interaction between international and domestic politics to shed new light on the inner workings of democratic politics. The volume opens with an engaging overview of the global crisis and the role played by international bodies like the G-20 and the WTO. In his survey of international initiatives in response to the recession, Eric Helleiner emphasizes the limits of multilateral crisis management, finding that domestic pressures were more important in reorienting fiscal policy. He also argues that unilateral decisions by national governments to hold large dollar reserves played the key role in preventing a dollar crisis, which would have considerably worsened the downturn. David R. Cameron discusses the fiscal responses of the European Union and its member states. He suggests that a profound coordination problem involving fiscal and economic policy impeded the E.U.'s ability to respond in a timely and effective manner. The volume also features several case studies and country comparisons. Nolan McCarty assesses the performance of the American political system during the crisis. He argues that the downturn did little to dampen elite polarization in the U.S.; divisions within the Democratic Party—as well as the influence of the financial sector—narrowed the range of policy options available to fight the crisis. Ben W. Ansell examines how fluctuations in housing prices in 30 developed countries affected the policy preferences of both citizens and political parties. His evidence shows that as housing prices increased, homeowners expressed preferences for both lower taxes and a smaller safety net. As more citizens supplement their day-to-day income with assets like stocks and housing, Ansell's research reveals a potentially significant trend in the formation of public opinion. Five years on, the prospects for a prolonged slump in economic activity remain high, and the policy choices going forward are contentious. But the policy changes made between 2007 and 2010 will likely constrain any new initiatives in the future. Coping with Crisis offers unmatched analysis of the decisions made in the developed world during this critical period. It is an essential read for scholars of comparative politics and anyone interested in a comprehensive account of the new international politics of austerity.
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Created Unequal
The Crisis in American Pay
James K. Galbraith
University of Chicago Press, 2000
The boom of the U.S. economy in the late 1990s suggests that Americans are better off than they were a decade ago, but this is not true across the board and the reason, as James Galbraith explains, is wage inequality. He contends that inequality is not the result of impersonal market forces but of specific government decisions and the poor economic performance they created. Featuring a new afterword on wage shifts since 1994, Created Unequal is a rousing book that reminds us we can reclaim our country through economic understanding, commonsense policy, and political action.

"Created Unequal is not light reading, but Galbraith's elegant arguments, passionate exposition, and profound conclusions make it worth the trouble. . . . [Galbraith] remind[s] us that the economy is and ought to be run by humans, not humans by the economy."—Joanna Ciulla, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Created Unequal is a lucid and wise explanation of why America seems to be prospering while most Americans aren't. James Galbraith takes steady aim at a variety of widely accepted economic myths and hits most of them dead center. This book will tell you a lot about the way your economic world really works."—Jeff Faux, President of the Economic Policy Institute

"[A] brilliant and iconoclastic examination of the major social trend of our time."—Michael Lind, Washington Monthly

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Cries of Crisis
Rethinking the Health Care Debate
Robert B. Hackey
University of Nevada Press, 2015
Since the late 1960s, health care in the United States has been described as a system in crisis. No matter their position, those seeking to improve the system have relied on the rhetoric of crisis to build support for their preferred remedies, to the point where the language and imagery of a health care crisis are now deeply embedded in contemporary politics and popular culture.

In Cries of Crisis, Robert B. Hackey analyzes media coverage, political speeches, films, and television shows to demonstrate the role that language and symbolism have played in framing the health care debate, shaping policy making, and influencing public perceptions of problems in the health care system. He demonstrates that the idea of crisis now means so many different things to so many different groups that it has ceased to have any shared meaning at all. He argues that the ceaseless talk of “crisis,” without a commonly accepted definition of that term, has actually impeded efforts to diagnose and treat the chronic problems plaguing the American health care system. Instead, he contends, reformers must embrace a new rhetorical strategy that links proposals to improve the system with deeply held American values like equality and fairness.
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Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema
Joanna Page
Duke University Press, 2009
There has been a significant surge in recent Argentine cinema, with an explosion in the number of films made in the country since the mid-1990s. Many of these productions have been highly acclaimed by critics in Argentina and elsewhere. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is its coinciding with a period of severe economic crisis and civil unrest in the nation. Offering the first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, Joanna Page explains how these productions have registered Argentina’s experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, and economic crisis. In different ways, the films selected for discussion testify to the social consequences of growing unemployment, rising crime, marginalization, and the expansion of the informal economy.

Page focuses particularly on films associated with New Argentine Cinema, but she also discusses highly experimental films and genre movies that borrow from the conventions of crime thrillers, Westerns, and film noir. She analyzes films that have received wide international recognition alongside others that have rarely been shown outside Argentina. What unites all the films she examines is their attention to shifts in subjectivity provoked by political or economic conditions and events. Page emphasizes the paradoxes arising from the circulation of Argentine films within the same global economy they so often critique, and she argues that while Argentine cinema has been intent on narrating the collapse of the nation-state, it has also contributed to the nation’s reconstruction. She brings the films into dialogue with a broader range of issues in contemporary film criticism, including the role of national and transnational film studies, theories of subjectivity and spectatorship, and the relationship between private and public spheres.

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Crisis and Continuity
The Economy of Spanish Lombardy in the Seventeenth Century
Domenico Sella
Harvard University Press, 1979

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Crisis and Control
Institutional Change in Financial Market Regulation
Edited by Renate Mayntz
Campus Verlag, 2012
In reaction to the international financial crisis of 2007, a network of social scientists from seven countries analyzed the various changes in the regulation of financial markets, and this book presents their results. The articles published herein show patterns of institutional change that were triggered by the economic crisis on different political levels, of their implementation and effectiveness, as well as their results. An indispensible tool for political scientists, Crisis and Control contributes significantly to the theory of institutional change.
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Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' Metamorphoses
Nancy Shumate
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Apuleius' wonderful Latin novel Metamorphoses, written in the second century C.E., was for a long time neglected. In recent years some have attempted to understand the Metamorphoses by applying contemporary critical theory to the work, without notable success. In Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' "Metamorphoses" Nancy Shumate takes a new and profitable approach: she uses an epistemologically oriented model of religious conversion to study the experiences of the novel's central character, Lucius, who is turned into an ass and back again.
Shumate draws on a wide range of literary and nonliterary representations of conversion in order to establish a useful theoretical framework. The Metamorphoses is exposed as a text anticipating later narratives in its concern with world-building, with the narrator's subjective reality, and with the invocation and critique of religious experience.
Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' "Metamorphoses" will be of interest to classicists and scholars of Silver Latin and of the increasingly popular ancient novel, as well as to students of psychology and the sociology of religious experience.
Nancy Shumate is Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literatures, Smith College.
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Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China
Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li Yu's World
Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang
University of Michigan Press, 1998
The seventeenth century was a time of great social and political upheaval in China. In Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China, Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang offer a detailed and engaging analysis of society, culture, and the state in China during this critical period.
The main thread of the book follows the life and works of a remarkable figure of the period, Li Yü (1611-80), whose vast array of accomplishments and experiences mirror seventeenth-century China in all its complexity and excitement. Li Yü's China was a world of unprecedented changes in almost all spheres of life. A thriving commercial and industrial economy, stupendous population growth, and the emergence of a new age of science and technology were accompanied by intense urbanization, radical views on money, wealth, and luxury, liberal attitudes toward sexuality, and developments that would change the nature of the literary and intellectual world. The Changs' exhaustive exploration of Chinese historical and literary sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is combined with a selective application of interpretive insights and analytic techniques from the major theoretical schools.
An important resource for scholars in history, literature, and Asian studies, Crisis and Transformation extends its appeal to those interested in the history of science, issues of gender and social transformation, and popular culture movements.
Chun-shu Chang is Professor of History, University of Michigan, and Honorary Professor of Chinese History, China. Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang is Visiting Associate Professor of History and Research Associate, Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan.
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Crisis In Bethlehem
John Strohmeyer
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994
Pulitzer Prize winner John Strohmeyer’s account of the collapse of Bethlehem Steel.  As editor of the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Globe-Times from 1956 to 1984, Strohmeyer followed the steel industry from the height of its power through its decline.  He evaluates the self-indulgence of both the unions and industry management and movingly describes the human agony caused by the failure of steel.  His account is reinforced by over one hundred interviews with steelworkers, union leaders, steel executives, and industry analysts.  First issued in 1986, the book is more significant than ever.  In this edition, Strohmeyer includes an update on steel today.
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Crisis in Costa Rica
The 1948 Revolution
By John Patrick Bell
University of Texas Press, 1971

The Costa Rican revolution of 1948 capped an extended period of social tension and political unrest. This book analyzes the circumstances of 1940–1948 that led to a successful armed uprising. A secondary and related theme is the role of José Figueres Ferrer in marshaling disparate groups into a movement sufficiently cohesive to seize and hold power.

In the 1940s the Communists, the Social Democrats (forerunners of the National Liberation Party), and the followers of Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia within the traditional National Republican party competed to lead the middle sector’s demand for modernization. Most accounts of this period have presented the Calderón regime as aristocratic or oligarchic in nature, yet as linked to an international Communist movement.

John Patrick Bell, supporting his argument with considerable detail and documentation from newspapers and private papers, argues that Calderón came to depend upon his alliance with the Communist-oriented Vanguardia Popular to counteract the defection of the right wing of the National Republican party and that the sources of the Vanguardia Popular were basically indigenous. The calderonistas’ comprehensive program for social and economic reform had elicited strong conservative reaction, and this opposition was ready to push the charge of communism against Calderón.

Costa Rica thus entered a period of violent political confrontation that culminated in the electoral victory of the conservative candidate, Otilio Ulate Blanco, in February 1948. When the calderonista majority in Congress annulled the election, José Figueres Ferrer launched a successful uprising purportedly to force ratification of Ulate’s election. In reality, however, Figueres had been planning a revolt for nearly six years to redirect modernization along social democratic lines.

Figueres and his group, seeking even more radical reforms than the calderonistas, were able to use the opposition movement to their advantage, simply because they were prepared, even with force, when the right moment arrived. The National Liberation Movement, led to power by Figueres, dominated the national political development of Costa Rica for decades afterward.

Eschewing a strictly chronological framework, Bell has utilized a topical structure that facilitates a full description of shifts in foreign policy in the United States and Latin America that affected the outcome of the struggle in Costa Rica.

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Crisis in Employment
Jane Jerrard
American Library Association, 2008

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The Crisis in Energy Policy
John M. Deutch
Harvard University Press, 2011

Our future depends on what we do about energy. This stark fact, clear since the oil embargo of the 1970s, has been hammered home through crisis after crisis—and yet our government has failed to come up with a coherent energy policy. John Deutch, with his extraordinary mix of technical, scholarly, corporate, and governmental expertise in the realm of energy, is uniquely qualified to explain what has stood in the way of progress on this most pressing issue. His book is at once an eye-opening history of the muddled practices that have passed for energy policy over the past thirty years, and a cogent account of what we can and should learn from so many breakdowns of strategy and execution.

Three goals drive any comprehensive energy policy: develop an effective approach to climate change; transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy technologies; and increase the efficiency of energy use to reduce dependence on imported oil. Why has every effort in this direction eventually fallen short? Deutch identifies the sources of this failure in our popular but unrealistic goals, our competing domestic and international agendas, and our poor analysis in planning, policy-making, and administering government programs. Most significantly, The Crisis in Energy Policy clarifies the need to link domestic and global considerations, as well as the critical importance of integrating technical, economic, and political factors. Written for experts and citizens alike, this book will strengthen the hand of anyone concerned about the future of energy policy.

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Crisis in Higher Education
A Plan to Save Small Liberal Arts Colleges in America
Jeffrey R. Docking
Michigan State University Press, 2014
In 2005 Adrian College was home to 840 enrolled students and had a tuition income of $8.54 million. By fall of 2011, enrollment had soared to 1,688, and tuition income had increased to $20.45 million. For the first time in years, the small liberal arts college was financially viable. Adrian College experienced this remarkable growth during the worst American economy in seventy years and in a state ravaged by the decline of the big three auto companies. How, exactly, did this turnaround happen? Crisis in Higher Education: A Plan to Save Small Liberal Arts Colleges in America was written to facilitate replication and generalization of Adrian College’s tremendous enrollment growth and retention success since 2005. This book directly addresses the economic competitiveness of small four-year institutions of higher education and presents an evidence-based solution to the enrollment and economic crises faced by many small liberal arts colleges throughout the country.
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Crisis in Korea
America, China and the Risk of War
Tim Beal
Pluto Press, 2011

The South Korean warship Cheonan was sunk in mysterious circumstances on 26 March 2010. The remarkable events that followed are analysed by Tim Beal and woven into a larger study of the increasingly volatile relations between North and South Korea and US concern about the rise of China.

South Korea's stance towards the North has hardened significantly since the new conservative government came to power. Beal argues that the South moved quickly to use the sinking of the Cheonan to put international pressure on the North, even before the cause of the sinking had been established. The US followed suit by attempting to pressurise China into condemning North Korea. The media reports at the time presented an open and shut case of unprovoked North Korean aggression, but the evidence points towards the accidental triggering of a South Korean mine as the cause and South Korean fabrication to incriminate the North.

With the South bent on forcing the fall of the North's regime with US help and China unlikely to stand idly by, this book offers an essential guide to the key factors behind the crisis and possible solutions.

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Crisis in Watertown
The Polarization of an American Community
Lynn Eden
University of Michigan Press, 1972
On May 19, 1968, the minister of the Congregational Church of Watertown, Wisconsin, was fired. Alan Kromholz was 29 when he came to Watertown with his wife and two small boys. Kromholz began his ministerial duties in February 1967, seven months before Father James Groppi began marching in Milwaukee. In the middle of September Watertown's city attorney received a model fair housing ordinance from the state, with a recommendation that it be adopted. Thus the polarization began. It was sharpened by the publication of an underground newspaper and the establishment of a coffee house, by feelings that Kromholz was neglecting his pastoral duties and providing a subversive example for the young, by rumors of a black invasion. On May 19, 1968, Reverend Kromholz was fired. Visiting Watertown two years later, Lynn Eden captured the voices of protest and approval —voices that you have heard in your own town, in your own neighborhood, in yourself. The result is Crisis in Watertown: a true and remarkable document of our times.
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The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy
Richard A. Posner
Harvard University Press, 2010

Following his timely and well-received A Failure of Capitalism, Richard Posner steps back to take a longer view of the continuing crisis of democratic capitalism as the American and world economies crawl gradually back from the depths to which they had fallen in the autumn of 2008 and the winter of 2009.

By means of a lucid narrative of the crisis and a series of analytical chapters pinpointing critical issues of economic collapse and gradual recovery, Posner helps non-technical readers understand business-cycle and financial economics, and financial and governmental institutions, practices, and transactions, while maintaining a neutrality impossible for persons professionally committed to one theory or another. He calls for fresh thinking about the business cycle that would build on the original ideas of Keynes. Central to these ideas is that of uncertainty as opposed to risk. Risk can be quantified and measured. Uncertainty cannot, and in this lies the inherent instability of a capitalist economy.

As we emerge from the financial earthquake, a deficit aftershock rumbles. It is in reference to that potential aftershock, as well as to the government’s stumbling efforts at financial regulatory reform, that Posner raises the question of the adequacy of our democratic institutions to the economic challenges heightened by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis and the government’s energetic response to it have enormously increased the national debt at the same time that structural defects in the American political system may make it impossible to pay down the debt by any means other than inflation or devaluation.

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The Crisis of Care
Affirming and Restoring Caring Practices in the Helping Professions
Susan S. Phillips and Patricia Benner, Editors
Georgetown University Press

By combining stories of care, the reflections of caregiving practitioners, and interpretations of caregiving within a larger social and theoretical framework, this collection identifies the values and skills involved in quality caregiving at the individual level and affirms their importance for reshaping our public caregiving institutions. Contributors from the fields of medicine, nursing, teaching, ministry, sociology, psychotherapy, theology, and philosophy articulate their values, hopes, commitments, and practices both in theoretical essays and in narratives of caregiving that reveal the complexities of skillful practice.

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Crisis of Conscience
Arkansas Methodists and the Civil Rights Struggle
James T. Clemons
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2007
Crisis of Conscience features personal stories by Arkansas Methodist pastors, laypersons, and community leaders—including Dale Bumpers, M. Joycelyn Elders, and Miller Williams—who lived through the struggles for civil rights in the 1950s and saw their congregations and other institutions rocked by the tumultuous events of the history-making era. The book also depicts the desegregation of Hendrix College, the prophetic role of Philander Smith College in civil rights activism, and the experiences of other Arkansas Methodist institutions in the great freedom struggle that caused many of the state’s church members to realize they could no longer reconcile their belief in God with participation in a segregated society.
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Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl
Northwestern University Press, 1970
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism.

Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task—and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity."
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The Crisis of German Ideology
Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich
George L. Mosse
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
This new edition revisits the renowned historian George L. Mosse’s landmark work exploring the ideological foundations of Nazism in Germany. First published in 1964, this volume was among the first to examine the intellectual origins of the Third Reich. Mosse introduced readers to what is known as the völkisch ideal—the belief that the German people were united through a transcendental essence. This mindset led to the exclusion of Jews and other groups, eventually allowing Nazi leaders to take their beliefs to catastrophic extremes. The critical introduction by Steven E. Aschheim, the author of Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad and many other books, brings Mosse’s work into the present moment.
 
George L. Mosse (1918–99) was a legendary scholar, teacher, and mentor. A refugee from Nazi Germany, in 1955 he joined the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was both influential and popular. Mosse was an early leader in the study of modern European cultural and intellectual history, fascism, and the history of sexuality and masculinity. Over his career he authored more than two dozen books.
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The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus
Melanie Racette-Campbell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
The political rupture caused by the ascension of Augustus Caesar in ancient Rome, which ended the centuries-old Republic, had drastic consequences for the performance and understanding of masculinity in a markedly androcentric society. Previously, masculinity was established and maintained through the frame of competition, in both public and private spheres—but the total accumulation of power by one man foreclosed most avenues of, and even appreciation for, competition. Melanie Racette-Campbell examines how Rome’s elite men navigated this liminal moment between Republic and Empire, and shows that the process was neither linear nor uniform. 

Already in the late Republic, prior to Augustus’s rise to power, cracks in the hegemonic concept of masculinity were starting to show. Careful reading of contemporary texts reveals a decades-long process as tumultuous and unsteady as the political events they echoed, one in which multiple and competing strategies for reconceiving the nature of masculinity were tested, employed, discarded, and adopted in a complex public-private discourse. The eventual reconstitution of a definition of Roman manhood was not easily agreed upon. Masculinity in both the Republic and the Empire are well studied subjects, but by shining a light on the precise moment of transition Racette-Campbell unveils the precise complexity, contours, and nuances of the Augustan crisis of masculinity.
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The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World
Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Patocka
Lubica Ucník
Ohio University Press, 2016

In The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, Ľubica Učník examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl’s final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patočka.

For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing irrationalism that threatened to undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary “life-world”: the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl’s concerns in today’s context, Učník first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Patočka.

Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. Učník provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.

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The Crisis of Neoliberalism
Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy
Harvard University Press, 2013
This book examines “the great contraction” of 2007–2010 within the context of the neoliberal globalization that began in the early 1980s. This new phase of capitalism greatly enriched the top 5 percent of Americans, including capitalists and financial managers, but at a significant cost to the country as a whole. Declining domestic investment in manufacturing, unsustainable household debt, rising dependence on imports and financing, and the growth of a fragile and unwieldy global financial structure threaten the strength of the dollar. Unless these trends are reversed, the authors predict, the U.S. economy will face sharp decline.Summarizing a large amount of troubling data, the authors show that manufacturing has declined from 40 percent of GDP to under 10 percent in thirty years. Since consumption drives the American economy and since manufactured goods comprise the largest share of consumer purchases, clearly we will not be able to sustain the accumulating trade deficits.Rather than blame individuals, such as Greenspan or Bernanke, the authors focus on larger forces. Repairing the breach in our economy will require limits on free trade and the free international movement of capital; policies aimed at improving education, research, and infrastructure; reindustrialization; and the taxation of higher incomes.
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The Crisis of School Violence
A New Perspective
Marianna King
Michigan State University Press, 2020
The Crisis of School Violence is the only interdisciplinary book about school violence. It presents a broad and in-depth approach to the key questions about why bullying continues at an unprecedentedly high rate and why rampage school shootings continue to shock the nation. Based on extensive research, The Crisis of School Violence investigates human nature and its relation to aggressive behavior, with a special focus on the culture of violence that predicates school violence (including rampage shootings) and perpetuates industries that profit from violence. Marianna King presents the considerable psychological and neuroscientific research that investigates the effects of violent entertainment media on the brain and, subsequently, on behavior, which clearly reveals a causal connection between exposure to violent electronic entertainment media—especially violent video games—and increased aggressive and violent behavior. The book also reveals a more specific connection between exposure to violent video games and rampage school shootings. Ultimately this volume is a call to action that includes recommendations for parents, teachers, decision makers, and citizens alike.
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The Crisis of Secularism in India
Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds.
Duke University Press, 2007
While secularism has been integral to India’s democracy for more than fifty years, its uses and limits are now being debated anew. Signs of a crisis in the relations between state, society, and religion include the violence directed against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and the precarious situation of India’s minority religious groups more generally; the existence of personal laws that vary by religious community; the affiliation of political parties with fundamentalist religious organizations; and the rallying of a significant proportion of the diasporic Hindu community behind a resurgent nationalist Hinduism. There is a broad consensus that a crisis of secularism exists, but whether the state can resolve conflicts and ease tensions or is itself part of the problem is a matter of vigorous political and intellectual debate. In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading Indian cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India.

Scholars of history, anthropology, religion, politics, law, philosophy, and media studies take on a broad range of concerns. Some consider the history of secularism in India; others explore theoretical issues such as the relationship between secularism and democracy or the shortcomings of the categories “majority” and “minority.” Contributors examine how the debates about secularism play out in schools, the media, and the popular cinema. And they address two of the most politically charged sites of crisis: personal law and the right to practice and encourage religious conversion. Together the essays inject insightful analysis into the fraught controversy about the shortcomings and uncertain future of secularism in the world today.

Contributors. Flavia Agnes, Upendra Baxi, Shyam Benegal, Akeel Bilgrami, Partha Chatterjee, V. Geetha, Sunil Khilnani, Nivedita Menon, Ashis Nandy, Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash, Arvind Rajagopal, Paula Richman, Sumit Sarkar, Dwaipayan Sen, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Shabnum Tejani, Romila Thapar, Ravi S. Vasudevan, Gauri Viswanathan

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The Crisis of Socialism in Europe
Christiane Lemke and Gary Marks, eds.
Duke University Press, 1991
The revolutions in Eastern Europe and the recasting of socialism in Western Europe since 1989 have given rise to intense debate over the origins, character, and implications of the “crisis” of socialism. Is socialism in ideological, electoral, or organizational decline? Is the decline inevitable or can socialism be revitalized? This volume draws together historians and political scientists of Eastern and Western European politics to address these questions.
The collection begins with an historical overview of socialism in Western Europe and moves toward the suggestion of a framework for a post-socialist discourse. Among the topics covered are: the birth and death of communism and a regime type in Eastern Europe; how different forms of national communism were smothered by Sovietization in the postwar period; the origins of revolutions in Eastern Europe; the potential for social democracy in Hungary; the role of the Left in a reunified German; and directions for the Left in general.

Contributors. Geoff Eley, Konrad Jarausch, Herbert Kitschelt, Christiane Lemke, Andrei Markovits, Gary Marks, Wolfgang Merkel, Norman Naimark, Iván and Szonja Szelénya, Sharon Wolchik

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Crisis of the House Divided
An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 50th Anniversary Edition
Harry V. Jaffa
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Crisis of the House Divided is the standard historiography of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Harry Jaffa provides the definitive analysis of the political principles that guided Lincoln from his reentry into politics in 1854 through his Senate campaign against Douglas in 1858. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication, Jaffa has provided a new introduction.

"Crisis of the House Divided has shaped the thought of a generation of Abraham Lincoln and Civil War scholars."—Mark E. Needly, Jr., Civil War History

"An important book about one of the great episodes in the history of the sectional controversy. It breaks new ground and opens a new view of Lincoln's significance as a political thinker."—T. Harry Williams, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences

"A searching and provocative analysis of the issues confronted and the ideas expounded in the great debates. . . . A book which displays such learning and insight that it cannot fail to excite the admiration even of scholars who disagree with its major arguments and conclusions."—D. E. Fehrenbacher, American Historical Review

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Crisis of the Wasteful Nation
Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America
Ian Tyrrell
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Long before people were “going green” and toting reusable bags, the Progressive generation of the early 1900s was calling for the conservation of resources, sustainable foresting practices, and restrictions on hunting. Industrial commodities such as wood, water, soil, coal, and oil, as well as improvements in human health and the protection of “nature” in an aesthetic sense, were collectively seen for the first time as central to the country’s economic well-being, moral integrity, and international power. One of the key drivers in the rise of the conservation movement was Theodore Roosevelt, who, even as he slaughtered animals as a hunter, fought to protect the country’s natural resources.

In Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, Ian Tyrrell gives us a cohesive picture of Roosevelt’s engagement with the natural world along with a compelling portrait of how Americans used, wasted, and worried about natural resources in a time of burgeoning empire. Countering traditional narratives that cast conservation as a purely domestic issue, Tyrrell shows that the movement had global significance, playing a key role in domestic security and in defining American interests around the world. Tyrrell goes beyond Roosevelt to encompass other conservation advocates and policy makers, particularly those engaged with shaping the nation’s economic and social policies—policies built on an understanding of the importance of crucial natural resources. Crisis of the Wasteful Nation is a sweeping transnational work that blends environmental, economic, and imperial history into a cohesive tale of America’s fraught relationships with raw materials, other countries, and the animal kingdom.
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The Crisis of Western Education (The Works of Christopher Dawson)
Christopher Dawson
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
The Crisis of Western Education, originally published in 1961, served as a capstone of Christopher Dawson's thought on the Western educational system.
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The Cultural Revolution at the Margins
Chinese Socialism in Crisis
Yiching Wu
Harvard University Press, 2014

Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to "wreak havoc under the heaven" when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government's grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed.

The Cultural Revolution began as a "revolution from above," and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution's more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China's state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy.

The mass demobilizations of 1968-69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later.

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