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Boll Weevil Blues
Boll Weevil Blues
Giesen, James C.
¥394.36
Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region's chief cash crop-tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars.?As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South-as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. Giesen asks how the myth of the boll weevil's lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region-those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. Boll Weevil Blues brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives in a novel and important way that allows us to reconsider the making of the modern American South.
Building a Market
Building a Market
Harris, Richard
¥394.36
Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving our dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, consumer magazines, a cable television network, and thousands of home improvement stores.Building a Market charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, Richard Harris shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s-and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of Do-It-Yourself.?Deeply insightful, Building a Market is the carefully crafted history of the emergence and evolution of a home improvement revolution that changed not just American culture but the American landscape as well.
Well Worth Saving
Well Worth Saving
Fishback, Price V.
¥288.41
The urgent demand for housing after World War I fueled a boom in residential construction that led to historic peaks in home ownership. Foreclosures at the time were rare, and when they did happen, lenders could quickly recoup their losses by selling into a strong market. But no mortgage system is equipped to deal with credit problems on the scale of the Great Depression. As foreclosures quintupled, it became clear that the mortgage system of the 1920s was not up to the task, and borrowers, lenders, and real estate professionals sought action at the federal level.Well Worth Saving tells the story of the disastrous housing market during the Great Depression and the extent to which an immensely popular New Deal relief program, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), was able to stem foreclosures by buying distressed mortgages from lenders and refinancing them. Drawing on historical records and modern statistical tools, Price Fishback, Jonathan Rose, and Kenneth Snowden investigate important unanswered questions to provide an unparalleled view of the mortgage loan industry throughout the 1920s and early '30s. Combining this with the stories of those involved, the book offers a clear understanding of the HOLC within the context of the housing market in which it operated, including an examination of how the incentives and behaviors at play throughout the crisis influenced the effectiveness of policy.?More than eighty years after the start of the Great Depression, when politicians have called for similar programs to quell the current mortgage crisis, this accessible account of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation holds invaluable lessons for our own time.
Before Mickey
Before Mickey
Crafton, Donald
¥288.41
This witty and fascinating study reminds us that there was animation before Disney: about thirty years of creativity and experimentation flourishing in such extraordinary work as Girdie the Dinosaur and Felix the Cat. Before Mickey, the first and only in-depth history of animation from 1898-1928, includes accounts of mechanical ingenuity, marketing and art. Crafton is equally adept at explaining techniques of sketching and camera work, evoking characteristic styles of such pioneering animators as Winsor McCay and Ladislas Starevitch, placing work in its social and economic context, and unraveling the aesthetic impact of specific cartoons."e;Before Mickey's scholarship is quite lively and its de*ions are evocative and often funny. The history of animation coexisted with that of live-action film but has never been given as much attention."e;-Tim Hunter, New York Times
Metropolitan Jews
Metropolitan Jews
Berman, Lila Corwin
¥288.41
In this provocative and accessible urban history, Lila Corwin Berman considers the role that Detroit's Jews played in the city's well-known narrative of migration and decline. Taking its cue from social critics and historians who have long looked toward Detroit to understand twentieth-century urban transformations, Metropolitan Jews tells the story of Jews leaving the city while retaining a deep connection to it. Berman argues convincingly that though most Jews moved to the suburbs, urban abandonment, disinvestment, and an embrace of conservatism did not invariably accompany their moves. Instead, the Jewish postwar migration was marked by an enduring commitment to a newly fashioned urbanism with a vision of self, community, and society that persisted well beyond city limits.Complex and subtle, Metropolitan Jews pushes urban scholarship beyond the tenacious black/white, urban/suburban dichotomy. It demands a more nuanced understanding of the process and politics of suburbanization and will reframe how we think about the American urban experiment and modern Jewish history.
Courtiers' Anatomists
Courtiers' Anatomists
Guerrini, Anita
¥288.41
The Courtiers' Anatomists is about dead bodies and live animals in Louis XIV's Paris--and the surprising links between them. Examining the practice of seventeenth-century anatomy, Anita Guerrini reveals how anatomy and natural history were connected through animal dissection and vivisection. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, Parisian scientists, with the support of the king, dissected hundreds of animals from the royal menageries and the streets of Paris. Guerrini is the first to tell the story of Joseph-Guichard Duverney, who performed violent, riot-inducing dissections of both animal and human bodies before the king at Versailles and in front of hundreds of spectators at the King's Garden in Paris. At the Paris Academy of Sciences, meanwhile, Claude Perrault, with the help of Duverney's dissections, edited two folios in the 1670s filled with lavish illustrations by court artists of exotic royal animals.Through the stories of Duverney and Perrault, as well as those of Marin Cureau de la Chambre, Jean Pecquet, and Louis Gayant, The Courtiers' Anatomists explores the relationships between empiricism and theory, human and animal, as well as the origins of the natural history museum and the relationship between science and other cultural activities, including art, music, and literature.
What Is Education?
What Is Education?
Jackson, Philip W.
¥253.10
One day in 1938, John Dewey addressed a room of professional educators and urged them to take up the task of "e;finding out just what education is."e;?Reading this lecture in the late 1940s, Philip W. Jackson took Dewey's charge to heart and spent the next sixty years contemplating his words. The stimulating result of a lifetime of thinking about educating, What Is Educationis a profound philosophical exploration of how we transmit knowledge in human society and how we think about accomplishing that vital task.?Most contemporary approaches to education follow a strictly empirical track, aiming to discover pragmatic solutions for teachers and school administrators. Jackson argues that we need to learn not just how to improve on current practices but also how to think about what education means-in short, we need to answer Dewey by constantly rethinking education from the ground up. Guiding us through the many facets of Dewey's comments, Jackson also calls on Hegel, Kant, and Paul Tillich to shed light on how a society does, can, and should transmit truth and knowledge to successive generations. Teasing out the implications in these thinkers' works ultimately leads Jackson to the conclusion that education is at root a moral enterprise.?At a time when schools increasingly serve as a battleground for ideological contests, What Is Educationis a stirring call to refocus our minds on what is for Jackson the fundamental goal of education: making students as well as teachers-and therefore everyone-better people.
Engineering the Revolution
Engineering the Revolution
Alder, Ken
¥247.21
Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the "e;technological life."e;Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact-the gun-by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the "e;political"e; to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Mind, Self, and Society
Mind, Self, and Society
Mead, George Herbert
¥247.21
George Herbert Mead is widely recognized as one of the most brilliantly original American pragmatists. Although he had a profound influence on the development of social philosophy, he published no books in his lifetime. This makes the lectures collected in Mind, Self, and Society all the more remarkable, as they offer a rare synthesis of his ideas.This collection gets to the heart of Mead's meditations on social psychology and social philosophy. Its penetrating, conversational tone transports the reader directly into Mead's classroom as he teases out the genesis of the self and the nature of the mind. The book captures his wry humor and shrewd reasoning, showing a man comfortable quoting Aristotle alongside Alice in Wonderland.Included in this edition are an insightful foreword from leading Mead scholar Hans Joas, a revealing set of textual notes by Dan Huebner that detail the text's origins, and a comprehensive bibliography of Mead's other published writings. While Mead's lectures inspired hundreds of students, much of his brilliance has been lost to time. This new edition ensures that Mead's ideas will carry on, inspiring a new generation of thinkers.
Learning to Love Form 1040
Learning to Love Form 1040
Zelenak, Lawrence
¥311.96
No one likes paying taxes, much less the process of filing tax returns. For years, would-be reformers have advocated replacing the return-based mass income tax with a flat tax, federal sales tax, or some combination thereof. Congress itself has commissioned studies on the feasibility of a system of exact withholding. But might the much-maligned return-based taxation method serve an important yet overlooked civic purpose?In Learning to Love Form 1040, Lawrence Zelenak argues that filing taxes can strengthen fiscal citizenship by prompting taxpayers to reflect on the contract they have with their government and the value-or perceived lack of value-they receive in exchange for their money. Zelenak traces the mass income tax to its origins as a means for raising revenue during World War II. Even then, debates raged over the merits of consumption-based versus income taxation, as well as whether taxes should be withheld from payroll or paid at the time of filing. The result is the income tax system we have today-a system whose maddening complexity, intended to accommodate citizens in widely different circumstances, threatens to outweigh any civic benefits.If sitcoms and political cartoons are any indication, public understanding of the income tax is badly in need of a corrective. Zelenak clears up some of the most common misconceptions and closes with suggestions for how the current system could be substantially simplified to better serve its civic purpose.
Cruelty and Laughter
Cruelty and Laughter
Dickie, Simon
¥311.96
Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental-the creation of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie?disputes these assumptions in Cruelty and Laughter, a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility, Dickie uncovers a rich vein of?cruel humor?that?forces us to recognize just how slowly?ordinary human sufferings became worthy of sympathy.Delving into an enormous archive of comic novels, jestbooks, farces, variety shows, and cartoons,?Dickie finds?a vast repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wife-beating. Epigrams about syphilis and scurvy sit alongside one-act comedies about hunchbacks in love. He shows us that everyone-rich and poor, women as well as men-laughed along. In the process,?Dickie also expands our understanding of many of the century's major authors, including Samuel Richardson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. He devotes particular attention to Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, a novel that reflects repeatedly on the limits of compassion and the ethical problems of laughter. Cruelty and Laughter is an engaging, far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.
Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare
Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare
Mullaney, Steven
¥288.41
The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith.As Steven Mullaney shows in?The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries-audiences as well as playwrights-reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare's first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.
Hayek's Challenge
Hayek's Challenge
Caldwell, Bruce
¥265.87
Friedrich A. Hayek is regarded as one of the preeminent economic theorists of the twentieth century, as much for his work outside of economics as for his work within it. During a career spanning several decades, he made contributions in fields as diverse as psychology, political philosophy, the history of ideas, and the methodology of the social sciences. Bruce Caldwell-editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek-understands Hayek's thought like few others, and with this book he offers us the first full intellectual biography of this pivotal social theorist.Caldwell begins by providing the necessary background for understanding Hayek's thought, tracing the emergence, in fin-de-sicle Vienna, of the Austrian school of economics-a distinctive analysis forged in the midst of contending schools of thought. In the second part of the book, Caldwell follows the path by which Hayek, beginning from the standard Austrian assumptions, gradually developed his unique perspective on not only economics but a broad range of social phenomena. In the third part, Caldwell offers both an assessment of Hayek's arguments and, in an epilogue, an insightful estimation of how Hayek's insights can help us to clarify and reexamine changes in the field of economics during the twentieth century.As Hayek's ideas matured, he became increasingly critical of developments within mainstream economics: his works grew increasingly contrarian and evolved in striking-and sometimes seemingly contradictory-ways. Caldwell is ideally suited to explain the complex evolution of Hayek's thought, and his analysis here is nothing short of brilliant, impressively situating Hayek in a broader intellectual context, unpacking the often difficult turns in his thinking, and showing how his economic ideas came to inform his ideas on the other social sciences.Hayek's Challenge will be received as one of the most important works published on this thinker in recent decades.
Moral Imagination
Moral Imagination
Johnson, Mark
¥265.87
Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation.Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection.
Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws
Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws
Strauss, Leo
¥265.87
The posthumous publication of The Argument and the Action of Plato's "e;Laws"e; was compiled shortly before the death of Leo Strauss in 1973. Strauss offers an insightful and instructive reading through careful probing of Plato's classic text."e;Strauss's The Argument and the Action of Plato's 'Laws' reflects his interest in political thought, his dogged method of following the argument of the Laws step by step, and his vigorous defense of this dialogue's integrity in respect to the ideals of the Republic."e;-Cross Currents"e;The unique characteristics of this commentary on the Laws reflect the care and precision which were the marks of Professor Strauss's efforts to understand the complex thoughts of other men."e;-Allan D. Nelson, Canadian Journal of Political Science"e;Thorough and provocative, an important addition to Plato scholarship."e;-Library Journal"e;The major purpose of the commentary is to provide a reading of the dialogue which displays its structural arrangement and the continuity of the argument."e;-J. W. Dy, Bibliographical Bulletin of Philosophy"e;The reader of Strauss's book is indeed guided closely through the whole text."e;- M. J. Silverthorne, The Humanities Association ReviewLeo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago.
Difficult Reputations
Difficult Reputations
Fine, Gary Alan
¥253.10
We take reputations for granted. Believing in the bad and the good natures of our notorious or illustrious forebears is part of our shared national heritage. Yet we are largely ignorant of how such reputations came to be, who was instrumental in creating them, and why. Even less have we considered how villains, just as much as heroes, have helped our society define its values.Presenting essays on America's most reviled traitor, its worst president, and its most controversial literary ingnue (Benedict Arnold, Warren G. Harding, and Lolita), among others, sociologist Gary Alan Fine analyzes negative, contested, and subcultural reputations. Difficult Reputations offers eight compelling historical case studies as well as a theoretical introduction situating the complex roles in culture and history that negative reputations play.Arguing the need for understanding real conditions that lead to proposed interpretations, as well as how reputations are given meaning over time, this book marks an important contribution to the sociologies of culture and knowledge.
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Dreyfus, Hubert L.
¥247.21
This book, which Foucault himself has judged accurate, is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault's work as a whole.To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault's work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault's work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method-"e;interpretative analytics"e;-capable fo explaining both the logic of structuralism's claim to be an objective science and the apparent validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition."e;There are many new secondary sources [on Foucault]. None surpass the book by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. . . . The American paperback edition contains Foucault's 'On the Genealogy of Ethics,' a lucid interview that is now our best source for seeing how he construed the whole project of the history of sexuality."e;-David Hoy, London Review of Books
Reading the World
Reading the World
Franklin-Brown, Mary
¥488.54
The thirteenth century saw such a proliferation of new encyclopedic texts that more than one scholar has called it the "e;century of the encyclopedias."e; Variously referred to as a speculum, thesaurus, or imago mundi-the term encyclopedia was not commonly applied to such books until the eighteenth century-these texts were organized in such a way that a reader could easily locate a collection of authoritative statements on any given topic. Because they reproduced, rather than simply summarized, parts of prior texts, these compilations became libraries in miniature.?In this groundbreaking study, Mary Franklin-Brown examines writings in Latin, Catalan, and French that are connected to the encyclopedic movement: Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum maius; Ramon Llull's Libre de meravelles, Arbor scientiae, and Arbre de filosofia d'amor; and Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose. Franklin-Brown analyzes the order of knowledge in these challenging texts, describing the wide-ranging interests, the textual practices-including commentary, compilation, and organization-and the diverse discourses that they absorb from preexisting classical, patristic, and medieval writing. She also demonstrates how these encyclopedias, like libraries, became "e;heterotopias"e; of knowledge-spaces where many possible ways of knowing are juxtaposed.?But Franklin-Brown's study will not appeal only to historians: she argues that a revised understanding of late medievalism makes it possible to discern a close connection between scholasticism and contemporary imaginative literature. She shows how encyclopedists employed the same practices of figuration, narrative, and citation as poets and romanciers, while much of the difficulty of the imaginative writing of this period derives from a juxtaposition of heterogeneous discourses inspired by encyclopedias.With rich and innovative readings of texts both familiar and neglected, Reading the World reveals how the study of encyclopedism can illuminate both the intellectual work and the imaginative writing of the scholastic age.
The Cybernetic Brain
The Cybernetic Brain
Andrew Pickering
¥282.53
Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present.The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics' impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.
The Paradoxes of Integration
The Paradoxes of Integration
J. Eric Oliver
¥200.12
Tali Mendelberg and Janelle . In 1999, while at Princeton University, Tali and I started talking about race and social environments. At the time I was writing about how suburban social contexts influence civic participation, and she suggested it might be interesting to examine their impact on racial attitudes. This piqued my interest, and, working together, we published a paper examining how economic and racial contexts shaped whites' racial attitudes. A year later, while at Yale University, Janelle and I began to wonder if these same effects might be evident among minority populations as well. As an undergraduate at UCLA, Janelle had worked as a researcher on the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality (MCSUI) and told me the data might be a great source for testing some hypotheses about interminority attitudes. Working together, we later published a paper using the Los Angeles portion of the MCSUI study. I am greatly indebted to both Tali and Janelle for helping me first engage this difficult topic and work through many core issues in this analysis.
Power of the Between
Power of the Between
Paul Stoller
¥188.35
It is the anthropologist's fate to always be between things: countries, languages, cultures, even realities. But rather than lament this, anthropologist Paul Stoller here celebrates the creative power of the between, showing how it can transform us, changing our conceptions of who we are, what we know, and how we live in the world.Beginning with his early days with the Peace Corps in Africa and culminating with a recent bout with cancer, The Power of the Between is an evocative account of the circuitous path Stoller's life has taken, offering a fascinating depiction of how a career is shaped over decades of reading and research. Stoller imparts his accumulated wisdom not through grandiose pronouncements but by drawing on his gift for storytelling. Tales of his apprenticeship to a sorcerer in Niger, his studies with Claude Lvi-Strauss in Paris, and his friendships with West African street vendors in New York City accompany philosophical reflections on love, memory, power, courage, health, and illness.Graced with Stoller's trademark humor and narrative elegance, The Power of the Between is both the story of a distinguished career and a profound meditation on coming to terms with the impermanence of all things.