NYU Press

Contrary to the stereotype of the “strong Black woman,” African American women are more plagued by domestic violence than any other racial group in the United States. In fact, African American women experience intimate partner violence at a rate 35% higher than white women and about two and a half times more than women of other races and ethnicities. This common portrayal can hinder black women seeking help and support simply because those on the outside don't think help is needed. Yet, as Hillary Potter argues in Battle Cries: Black Women and Intimate Partner Abuse, this stereotype often helps these African American women to resist and to verbally and physically retaliate against their abusers. Thanks to this generalization, Potter observes, black women are less inclined to label themselves as “victims” and more inclined to fight back.
Battle Cries is an eye-opening examination of African American women's experiences with intimate partner abuse, the methods used to contend with abusive mates, and the immediate and enduring consequences resulting from the maltreatment. Based on intensive interviews with 40 African American women abused by their male partners, Potter's analysis takes into account variations in their experiences based on socioeconomic class, education level, and age, and discusses the common abuses and perceptions they share. Combining her remarkable findings with black feminist thought and critical race theory, Potter offers a unique and significant window through which we can better understand this understudied though rampant social problem.

Few institutions were as central to nineteenth-century American culture as the home. Emerging in the 1820s as a sentimental space apart from the public world of commerce and politics, the Victorian home transcended its initial association with the private lives of the white, native-born bourgeoisie to cross lines of race, ethnicity, class, and region. Throughout the nineteenth century, home was celebrated as a moral force, domesticity moved freely into the worlds of politics and reform, and home and marketplace repeatedly remade each other.





At Home in Nineteenth-Century America draws upon advice manuals, architectural designs, personal accounts, popular fiction, advertising images, and reform literature to revisit the variety of places Americans called home. Entering into middle-class suburban houses, slave cabins, working-class tenements, frontier dugouts, urban settlement houses, it explores the shifting interpretations and experiences of these spaces from within and without. Nineteenth-century homes and notions of domesticity seem simultaneously distant and familiar. This sense of surprise and recognition is ideal for the study of history, preparing us to view the past with curiosity and empathy, inspiring comparisons to the spaces we inhabit today—malls, movie theaters, city streets, and college campuses. Permitting us to listen closely to the nineteenth century’s sweeping conversation about home in its various guises, At Home in Nineteenth-Century America encourages us to hear our contemporary conversation about the significance and meaning of home anew while appreciating the lingering imprint of past ideals.





Instructor's Guide

Honorable Mention for the 2008 Robert Park Outstanding Book Award given by the ASA’s Community and Urban Sociology Section
Mardi Gras, jazz, voodoo, gumbo, Bourbon Street, the French Quarter—all evoke that place that is unlike any other: New Orleans. In Authentic New Orleans, Kevin Fox Gotham explains how New Orleans became a tourist town, a spectacular locale known as much for its excesses as for its quirky Southern charm.
Gotham begins in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina amid the whirlwind of speculation about the rebuilding of the city and the dread of outsiders wiping New Orleans clean of the grit that made it great. He continues with the origins of Carnival and the Mardi Gras celebration in the nineteenth century, showing how, through careful planning and promotion, the city constructed itself as a major tourist attraction. By examining various image-building campaigns and promotional strategies to disseminate a palatable image of New Orleans on a national scale Gotham ultimately establishes New Orleans as one of the originators of the mass tourism industry—which linked leisure to travel, promoted international expositions, and developed the concept of pleasure travel.
Gotham shows how New Orleans was able to become one of the most popular tourist attractions in the United States, especially through the transformation of Mardi Gras into a national, even international, event. All the while Gotham is concerned with showing the difference between tourism from above and tourism from below—that is, how New Orleans’ distinctiveness is both maximized, some might say exploited, to serve the global economy of tourism as well as how local groups and individuals use tourism to preserve and anchor longstanding communal traditions.

When most people think of prisons, they imagine chaos, violence, and fundamentally, an atmosphere of overwhelming brute masculinity. But real prisons rarely fit the “Big House” stereotype of popular film and literature. One fifth of all correctional officers are women, and the rate at which women are imprisoned is growing faster than that of men. Yet, despite increasing numbers of women prisoners and officers, ideas about prison life and prison work are sill dominated by an exaggerated image of men’s prisons where inmates supposedly struggle for physical dominance.
In a rare comparative analysis of men’s and women’s prisons, Dana Britton identifies the factors that influence the gendering of the American workplace, a process that often leaves women in lower-paying jobs with less prestige and responsibility.
In interviews with dozens of male and female officers in five prisons, Britton explains how gender shapes their day-to-day work experiences. Combining criminology, penology, and feminist theory, she offers a radical new argument for the persistence of gender inequality in prisons and other organizations. At Work in the Iron Cage demonstrates the importance of the prison as a site of gender relations as well as social control.

For well over a century, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) has been the most vilified multinational corporation operating in Latin America. Criticism of the UFCO has been widespread, ranging from politicians to consumer activists, and from labor leaders to historians, all portraying it as an overwhelmingly powerful corporation that shaped and often exploited its host countries. In this first history of the UFCO in Colombia, Marcelo Bucheli argues that the UFCO's image as an all-powerful force in determining national politics needs to be reconsidered. Using a previously unexplored source—the internal archives of Colombia's UFCO operation—Bucheli reveals that before 1930, the UFCO worked alongside a business-friendly government that granted it generous concessions and repressed labor unionism. After 1930, however, the country experienced dramatic transformations including growing nationalism, a stronger labor movement, and increasing demands by local elites for higher stakes in the banana export business.
In response to these circumstances, the company abandoned production, selling its plantations (and labor conflicts) to local growers, while transforming itself into a marketing company. The shift was endorsed by the company's shareholders and financial analysts, who preferred lower profits with lower risks, and came at a time in which the demand for bananas was decreasing in America. Importantly, Bucheli shows that the effect of foreign direct investment was not unidirectional. Instead, the agency of local actors affected corporate strategy, just as the UFCO also transformed local politics and society.

"Ball's arguments are concise, compelling, and backed with considerable case law. This volume is highly recommended for upper-level undergraduates and above in law, philosophy, and the medical humanities interested in the 'right to die' debates. Summing up: Highly recommended." —Choice


Over the
past hundred years, average life expectancy in America has nearly doubled, due
largely to scientific and medical advances, but also as a consequence of safer
working conditions, a heightened awareness of the importance of diet and
health, and other factors. Yet while longevity is celebrated as an achievement
in modern civilization, the longer people live, the more likely they are to
succumb to chronic, terminal illnesses. In 1900, the average life expectancy
was 47 years, with a majority of American deaths attributed to influenza, tuberculosis,
pneumonia, or other diseases. In 2000, the average life expectancy was nearly
80 years, and for too many people, these long lifespans included cancer, heart
failure, Lou Gehrig’s disease, AIDS, or other fatal illnesses, and with them,
came debilitating pain and the loss of a once-full and often independent
lifestyle. In this compelling and provocative book, noted legal scholar Howard
Ball poses the pressing question: is it appropriate, legally and ethically, for
a competent individual to have the liberty to decide how and when to die when
faced with a terminal illness?

At Liberty to Die charts how, the right
of a competent, terminally ill person to die on his or her own terms with the
help of a doctor has come deeply embroiled in debates about the relationship
between religion, civil liberties, politics, and law in American life.
Exploring both the legal rulings and the media frenzies that accompanied the
Terry Schiavo case and others like it, Howard Ball contends that despite raging
battles in all the states where right to die legislation has been proposed, the
opposition to the right to die is intractable in its stance. Combining
constitutional analysis, legal history, and current events, Ball surveys the
constitutional arguments that have driven the right to die debate.

Using the cheap desktop publishing techniques of 'zine culture, and supplementing them with an extensive presence on the World Wide Web, the Bad Subjects Production Team has produced one of the only successful political 'zines in the US, as well as one of the first--and longest-running--on-line publications in the world.
Bad Subjects offers a critique of the post-1960s left in the United States, and attempts to reclaim a utopian vision for a political movement which has become fragmented and cynical about the possibility of social transformation. Indeed, Bad Subjects itself is simultaneously a valuable resource and an inspiration, a record of what politically-engaged cultural criticism can achieve, and an example of a progressive political community making use of new technologies.
Offering a way out of vulgar multiculturalism--based on separatism and the idea of "authenticity"--into a critical identity politics founded on coalitions, hybridity, and class consciousness, Bad Subjectsspeaks to readers both in and outside of the academy. Taking their cue from the feminist slogan, "the personal is political," and from Marxist injunctions to study "everyday life," Bad Subjects covers everything from popular culture and high technology to economic restructuring and political organizing, from Raymond Williams to The Dead Kennedys.
In the terrain of cultural criticism, Bad Subjects is an off-road vehicle roaring away from the beaten path.

Ever since George Washington warned against "foreign entanglements" in his 1796 farewell speech, the United States has wrestled with how to act toward other countries. Consequently, the history of anti-Americanism is as long and varied as the history of the United States.
In this multidisciplinary collection, seventeen leading thinkers provide substance and depth to the recent outburst of fast talk on the topic of anti-Americanism by analyzing its history and currency in five key global regions: the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, East Asia, and the United States. The commentary draws from social science as well as the humanities for an in-depth study of anti-American opinion and sentiment in different cultures.
The questions raised by these essays force us to explore the new ways America must interact with the world after 9/11 and the war against Iraq.
Contributors: Greg Grandin, Mary Louise Pratt, Ana Maria Dopico, George Yudice, Timothy Mitchell, Ella Shohat, Mary Nolan, Patrick Deer, Vangelis Calotychos, Harry Harootunian, Hyun Ok Park, Rebecca E. Karl, Moss Roberts, Linda Gordon, and John Kuo Wei Tchen.

When you think of astrology, you may think of the horoscope section in your local paper, or of Nancy Reagan's consultations with an astrologer in the White House in the 1980s. Yet almost every religion uses some form of astrology: some way of thinking about the sun, moon, stars, and planets and how they hold significance for human lives on earth.









Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions offers an accessible overview of the astrologies of the world's religions, placing them into context within theories of how the wider universe came into being and operates. Campion traces beliefs about the heavens among peoples ranging from ancient Egypt and China, to Australia and Polynesia, and India and the Islamic world.
Addressing each religion in a separate chapter, Campion outlines how, by observing the celestial bodies, people have engaged with the divine, managed the future, and attempted to understand events here on earth. This fascinating text offers a unique way to delve into comparative religions and will also appeal to those intrigued by New Age topics.

In As Long as We Both Shall Love, Karen M. Dunak provides a nuanced history of the American wedding and its celebrants. Blending an analysis of film, fiction, advertising, and prescriptive literature with personal views from letters, diaries, essays, and oral histories, Dunak demonstrates the ways in which the modern wedding epitomizes a diverse and consumerist culture and aims to reveal an ongoing debate about the power of peer culture, media, and the marketplace in America.

On Friday nights many parents want to have a little fun together—without the kids. But “getting a sitter”—especially a dependable one—rarely seems trouble-free. Will the kids be safe with “that girl”? It’s a question that discomfited parents have been asking ever since the emergence of the modern American teenage girl nearly a century ago. In Babysitter, Miriam Forman-Brunell brings critical attention to the ubiquitous, yet long-overlooked babysitter in the popular imagination and American history.
Informed by her research on the history of teenage girls’ culture, Forman-Brunell analyzes the babysitter, who has embodied adults’ fundamental apprehensions about girls’ pursuit of autonomy and empowerment. In fact, the grievances go both ways, as girls have been distressed by unsatisfactory working conditions. In her quest to gain a fuller picture of this largely unexamined cultural phenomenon, Forman-Brunell analyzes a wealth of diverse sources, such as The Baby-sitter’s Club book series, horror movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, urban legends, magazines, newspapers, television shows, pornography, and more.
Forman-Brunell shows that beyond the mundane, understandable apprehensions stirred by hiring a caretaker to “mind the children” in one’s own home, babysitters became lightning rods for society’s larger fears about gender and generational change. In the end, experts’ efforts to tame teenage girls with training courses, handbooks, and other texts failed to prevent generations from turning their backs on babysitting.

A groundbreaking anthology devoted to Asian/Pacific Islander American women and their experiences

Asian/Pacific Islander American Women is the first collection devoted to the historical study of A/PI women's diverse experiences in America. Covering a broad terrain from pre-large scale Asian emigration and Hawaii in its pre-Western contact period to the continental United States, the Philippines, and Guam at the end of the twentieth century, the text views women as historical subjects actively negotiating complex hierarchies of power.

The volume presents new findings about a range of groups, including recent immigrants to the U.S. and understudied communities. Comprised of original new work, it includes chapters on women who are Cambodian, Chamorro, Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Native Hawaiian, South Asian, and Vietnamese Americans. It addresses a wide range of women's experiences-as immigrants, military brides, refugees, American born, lesbians, workers, mothers, beauty contestants, and community activists. There are also pieces on historiography and methodology, and bibliographic and video documentary resources.

This groundbreaking anthology is an important addition to the scholarship in Asian/Pacific American studies, ethnic studies, American studies, women's studies, and U.S. history, and is a valuable resource for scholars and students.
Contributors include: Xiaolan Bao, Sucheng Chan, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Vivian Loyola Dames, Jennifer Gee, Madhulika S. Khandelwal, Lili M. Kim, Nancy In Kyung Kim, Erika Lee, Shirley Jennifer Lim, Valerie Matsumoto, Sucheta Mazumdar, Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, Trinity A. Ordona, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, Charlene Tung, Kathleen Uno, Linda Trinh Võ, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Ji-Yeon Yuh, and Judy Yung.

Asian American Religions brings together some of the most current research on Asian American religions from a social science perspective. The volume focuses on religion in Asian American communities in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, and the Silicon Valley/Bay Area, and it includes a current demographic overview of the various Asian populations across the United States. It also provides information on current trends, such as that Filipino and Korean Americans are the most religiously observant people in America, that over 60 percent of Asian Americans who have a religious identification are Christian, and that one-third of Muslims in the United States are Asian Americans.
Rather than organizing the book around particular ethnic groups or religions, Asian American Religions centers on thematic issues, like symbols and rituals, political boundaries, and generation gaps, in order to highlight the role of Asian American religions in negotiating, accepting, redefining, changing, and creating boundaries in the communities' social life.

Do animals have rights and, if so, what exactly are they? Further, how do these rights relate to human rights? These questions have long bedeviled scientists, philosophers, and animal advocates and today remain as contested as ever.
Combining the writings of leading academics and activists such as Peter Singer and Michael W. Fox, this anthology examines the development of animal rights discourse over the past quarter century to anticipate the future of the debate. Touching on every aspect of human-animal relations, from agriculture and animal experimentation to the animal rights movement in the United States and abroad, the contributors both question and affirm the utility of the concept of rights. Informing this volume is the belief that, regardless of where one stands on the issues of animal rights, it is simply indisputable that how we perceive and treat animals is fundamentally and inextricably related to how we define ourselves.

In the wake of the Mexican-American War, competing narratives of religious conquest and re-conquest were employed by Anglo American and ethnic Mexican Californians to make sense of their place in North America. These “invented traditions” had a profound impact on North American religious and ethnic relations, serving to bring elements of Catholic history within the Protestant fold of the United
States’ national history as well as playing an integral role in the emergence of the early Chicano/a movement.

Many Protestant Anglo Americans understood their settlement in the far Southwest as following in the footsteps of the colonial project begun by Catholic Spanish missionaries. In contrast, Californios—Mexican-Americans and Chicana/os—stressed deep connections to a pre-Columbian past over to their own Spanish heritage. Thus, as Anglo Americans fashioned themselves as the spiritual heirs to the Spanish frontier, many ethnic Mexicans came to see themselves as the spiritual heirs to a southwestern Aztec homeland.

Completely updated, the new edition of this acclaimed guide brings us 33 tours of public art, covering the length of the island, from the Cloisters and Harlem in northern Manhattan, to Central Park and the museum mile, to Rockefeller Center and Chelsea, and all the way down to the southern tip at Battery Park City. This indispensable guide also covers the outer boroughs, from Snug Harbor, Staten Island to the Socrates Sculpture Park and the Noguchi Museum in Queens, from Wave Hill in the Bronx all the way to the botanical gardens in Brooklyn.
The perfect guidebook for residents and tourists alike, Harrison and Rosenfeld uncover nooks and crannies off the beaten track alongside favored treasures, reminding us all why New York City is the art capital of the world.
Artwalks in New York contains:
Completely revised and updated entries, including seven new walks, reflecting the ever-changing city Includes over 25 walking tour maps, directions, and suggested visitation hours Listings of museums, art and auction galleries, art-filled public spaces, hotel lobbies, gardens, restaurants, subway stations, public sculpture and murals, and more Hundreds of interesting facts, anecdotes, and tidbits about New York City art from two expert guides

2008 United States Postal System’s Rita Lloyd Moroney Award
In the era before airplanes and e-mail, how did immigrants keep in touch with loved ones in their homelands, as well as preserve links with pasts that were rooted in places from which they voluntarily left? Regardless of literacy level, they wrote letters, explains David A. Gerber in this path-breaking study of British immigrants to the U.S. and Canada who wrote and received letters during the nineteenth century.
Scholars have long used immigrant letters as a lens to examine the experiences of immigrant groups and the communities they build in their new homelands. Yet immigrants as individual letter writers have not received significant attention; rather, their letters are often used to add color to narratives informed by other types of sources.
Authors of Their Lives analyzes the cycle of correspondence between immigrants and their homelands, paying particular attention to the role played by letters in reformulating relationships made vulnerable by separation. Letters provided sources of continuity in lives disrupted by movement across vast spaces that disrupted personal identities, which depend on continuity between past and present. Gerber reveals how ordinary artisans, farmers, factory workers, and housewives engaged in correspondence that lasted for years and addressed subjects of the most profound emotional and practical significance.

2008 Winner, MLA First Book Prize
Charting the proliferation of forms of mourning and memorial across a century increasingly concerned with their historical and temporal significance, Arranging Grief offers an innovative new view of the aesthetic, social, and political implications of emotion. Dana Luciano argues that the cultural plotting of grief provides a distinctive insight into the nineteenth-century American temporal imaginary, since grief both underwrote the social arrangements that supported the nation’s standard chronologies and sponsored other ways of advancing history.
Nineteenth-century appeals to grief, as Luciano demonstrates, diffused modes of “sacred time” across both religious and ostensibly secular frameworks, at once authorizing and unsettling established schemes of connection to the past and the future. Examining mourning manuals, sermons, memorial tracts, poetry, and fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Harriet E. Wilson, Herman Melville, Frances E. W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Luciano illustrates the ways that grief coupled the affective body to time. Drawing on formalist, Foucauldian, and psychoanalytic criticism, Arranging Grief shows how literary engagements with grief put forth ways of challenging deep-seated cultural assumptions about history, progress, bodies, and behaviors.

From the wooden teeth of George Washington to the Bly prosthesis, popular in the 1860s and boasting easy uniform motions of the limb, to today's lifelike approximations, prosthetic devices reveal the extent to which the evolution and design of technologies of the body are intertwined with both the practical and subjective needs of human beings.
The peculiar history of prosthetic devices sheds light on the relationship between technological change and the civilizing process of modernity, and analyzes the concrete materials of prosthetics which carry with them ideologies of body, ideals, body politics, and culture.
Simultaneously critiquing, historicizing, and theorizing prosthetics, Artificial Parts, Practical Lives lays out a balanced and complex picture of its subject, neither vilifying nor celebrating the merger of flesh and machine.

Illuminates the threats Black women face and the lack of substantive public policy towards gendered violence

Black women in marginalized communities are uniquely at risk of battering, rape, sexual harassment, stalking and incest. Through the compelling stories of Black women who have been most affected by racism, persistent poverty, class inequality, limited access to support resources or institutions, Beth E. Richie shows that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious, demonstrating how conservative legal, social, political and economic policies have impacted
activism in the U.S.-based movement to end violence against women.

Richie argues that Black women face particular peril because of the ways that race and culture have not figured centrally enough in the analysis of the causes and consequences of gender violence. As a result, the extent of physical, sexual and other forms of violence in the lives of Black women, the various forms it takes, and the contexts within which it occurs are minimized—at best—and frequently ignored. Arrested Justice brings issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization into focus right alongside of questions of public policy and gender violence, resulting in a compelling critique, a passionate re-framing of stories, and a call to action for change.

This is a new edition of Sandra Dawson's successful introductory textbook for students, in engineering, business studies, marketing, accounting, administration, and management who would like to improve their understanding of organizations. Fully revised and updated and assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, the book presents illustrated examples drawn from the author's research and industrial consultancy to identify and discuss organizations in terms of five key characteristics—people, interest groups, structure and culture, technology, and the environment—and the processes of power and conflict, communication, decision-making and implementation that define an organization.

2008 Winner, MLA First Book Prize
Charting the proliferation of forms of mourning and memorial across a century increasingly concerned with their historical and temporal significance, Arranging Grief offers an innovative new view of the aesthetic, social, and political implications of emotion. Dana Luciano argues that the cultural plotting of grief provides a distinctive insight into the nineteenth-century American temporal imaginary, since grief both underwrote the social arrangements that supported the nation’s standard chronologies and sponsored other ways of advancing history.
Nineteenth-century appeals to grief, as Luciano demonstrates, diffused modes of “sacred time” across both religious and ostensibly secular frameworks, at once authorizing and unsettling established schemes of connection to the past and the future. Examining mourning manuals, sermons, memorial tracts, poetry, and fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Harriet E. Wilson, Herman Melville, Frances E. W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Luciano illustrates the ways that grief coupled the affective body to time. Drawing on formalist, Foucauldian, and psychoanalytic criticism, Arranging Grief shows how literary engagements with grief put forth ways of challenging deep-seated cultural assumptions about history, progress, bodies, and behaviors.

Arising from Bondage is an epic story of the struggle of the Indo-Caribbean people. From the 1830's through World War I hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers were shipped from India to the Caribbean and settled in the former British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies. Like their predecessors, the African slaves, they labored on the sugar estates. Unlike the Africans their status was ambiguous--not actually enslaved yet not entirely free--they fought mightily to achieve power in their new home. Today in the English-speaking Caribbean alone there are one million people of Indian descent and they form the majority in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.
This study, based on official documents and archives, as well as previously unpublished material from British, Indian and Caribbean sources, fills a major gap in the history of the Caribbean, India, Britain and European colonialism. It also contributes powerfully to the history of diaspora and migration.

When most people think of prisons, they imagine chaos, violence, and fundamentally, an atmosphere of overwhelming brute masculinity. But real prisons rarely fit the “Big House” stereotype of popular film and literature. One fifth of all correctional officers are women, and the rate at which women are imprisoned is growing faster than that of men. Yet, despite increasing numbers of women prisoners and officers, ideas about prison life and prison work are sill dominated by an exaggerated image of men’s prisons where inmates supposedly struggle for physical dominance.
In a rare comparative analysis of men’s and women’s prisons, Dana Britton identifies the factors that influence the gendering of the American workplace, a process that often leaves women in lower-paying jobs with less prestige and responsibility.
In interviews with dozens of male and female officers in five prisons, Britton explains how gender shapes their day-to-day work experiences. Combining criminology, penology, and feminist theory, she offers a radical new argument for the persistence of gender inequality in prisons and other organizations. At Work in the Iron Cage demonstrates the importance of the prison as a site of gender relations as well as social control.

Prior to the Vietnam war, American intellectual life rested comfortably on shared assumptions and often common ideals. Intellectuals largely supported the social and economic reforms of the 1930s, the war against Hitler's Germany, and U.S. conduct during the Cold War. By the early 1960s, a liberal intellectual consensus existed.
The war in Southeast Asia shattered this fragile coalition, which promptly dissolved into numerous camps, each of which questioned American institutions, values, and ideals. Robert R. Tomes sheds new light on the demise of Cold War liberalism and the development of the New Left, and the steady growth of a conservatism that used Vietnam, and anti-war sentiment, as a rallying point. Importantly, Tomes provides new evidence that neoconservatism retreated from internationalism due largely to Vietnam, only to regroup later with substantially diminished goals and expectations.
Covering vast archival terrain, Apocalypse Then stands as the definitive account of the impact of the Vietnam war on American intellectual life.

Arab Americans are one of the most misunderstood segments of the U.S. population, especially after the events of 9/11. In Arab America, Nadine Naber tells the stories of second generation Arab American young adults living in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of whom are political activists engaged in two culturalist movements that draw on the conditions of diaspora, a Muslim global justice and a Leftist Arab movement.

Writing from a transnational feminist perspective, Naber reveals the complex and at times contradictory cultural and political processes through which Arabness is forged in the contemporary United States, and explores the apparently intra-communal cultural concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality as the battleground on which Arab American young adults and the looming world of America all wrangle. As this struggle continues, these young adults reject Orientalist thought, producing counter-narratives that open up new possibilities for transcending the limitations of Orientalist, imperialist, and conventional nationalist articulations of self, possibilities that ground concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality in some of the most urgent issues of our times: immigration politics, racial justice struggles, and U.S. militarism and war.

Twenty-five years after the start of the feminist sex wars, pornography remains a flashpoint issue, with feminists locked in a familiar argument: Are women victims or agents? In At Home with Pornography, Jane Juffer exposes the fruitlessness of this debate and suggests that it has prevented us from realizing women's changing relationship to erotica and porn.
Over the course of these same twenty-five years, there has been a proliferation of sexually explicit materials geared toward women, made available in increasingly mainstream venues. In asking "what is the relationship of women to pornography?" Juffer maintains that we need to stop obsessing over pornography's transgressive aspects, and start focusing on the place of porn and erotica in women's everyday lives. Where, she asks, do women routinely find it, for how much, and how is it circulated and consumed within the home? How is this circulation and consumption shaped by the different marketing categories that attempt to distinguish erotica from porn, such as women's literary erotica and sexual self-help videos for couples?
At Home with Pornography responds to these questions by viewing women's erotica within the context of governmental regulation that attempts to counterpose a "dangerous" pornography with the sanctity of the home. Juffer explorers how women's consumption of erotica and porn for their own pleasure can be empowering, while still acting to reinforce conservative ideals. She shows how, for instance, the Victoria's Secret catalog is able to function as a kind of pornography whose circulation is facilitated both by its reliance on Victorian themes of secrecy and privacy and on its appeals to the selfish pleasures of modern career women. In her pursuit to understand what women like and how they get it, Juffer delves into adult cable channels, erotic literary anthologies, sex therapy guides, cyberporn, masturbation, and sex toys, showing the varying degrees to which these materials have been domesticated for home consumption.
Representing the next generation of scholarship on pornography, At Home with Pornography will transform our understanding of women's everyday sexuality.

This Major Reference series brings together a wide range of key international articles in law and legal theory. Many of these essays are not readily accessible, and their presentation in these volumes will provide a vital new resource for both research and teaching. Each volume is edited by leading international authorities who explain the significance and context of articles in an informative and complete introduction.

The disintegration of the former Soviet Union, the end of the cold war and the trend of economic developmental "miracles" in disparate regions of the globe have brought a vast transformation to the political, economic, and security configurations of the world. Gone is the bipolar world of superpower rivalry, replaced by new international patterns and trends.
Nowhere is the transformation more striking than in East and Southeast Asia, the region which includes China, Japan, the "four tigers" of Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, and the emerging powers of Southeast Asia. The regional transformation in turn has extended beyond the region itself, profoundly affecting global politics and international relations.
Asia's New World Order traces the overall political, economic, and security developments of the region. The contributors look beyond the customary fixation on great powers to examine developments in the lesser powers, and to search for unforeseen policy implications and directions for the United States.

Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Rolando Hinojosa, E. Annie Proulx, Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland, and Thomas Pynchon: An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction introduces the work of a range of key American authors, all of whom can be said to engage with postmodernism. Exploring the vitality and energy of contemporary writing in light of pessimistic proclamations on the state of postmodern American culture, Bilton highlights the tension between "realistic" description and linguistic self-consciousness in contemporary fiction.
In addition, by addressing a central problem in literary theory—its neglect of literary discussion and the practice of reading—An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction is able to present a working model for reading a text theoretically.
As an introductory text, it assumes no prior knowledge of the authors of the novels discussed. To encourage understanding and aid further study, the following features are included:
* GLOSSARY OF CRITICAL AND LITERARY TERMS
* BIBLIOGRAPHY OF EACH AUTHOR'S WORKS
* BIOGRAPHY OF EACH AUTHOR
* GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
* THEMATIC AND AUTHOR INDICES

The metropolis has been the near exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, Scott Herring draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplines—art, media, literature, performance, and fashion studies—he develops an extended critique of how metronormativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater.
Impassioned and provocative, Another Country expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond its city limits. Herring leads his readers from faeries in the rural Midwest to photographs of white supremacists in the deep South, from Roland Barthes’s obsession with Parisian fashion to a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel set in the Appalachian Mountains, and from cubist paintings in Lancaster County to lesbian separatist communes on the northern California coast. The result is an entirely original account of how queer studies can—and should—get to another country.

Ever since George Washington warned against "foreign entanglements" in his 1796 farewell speech, the United States has wrestled with how to act toward other countries. Consequently, the history of anti-Americanism is as long and varied as the history of the United States.
In this multidisciplinary collection, seventeen leading thinkers provide substance and depth to the recent outburst of fast talk on the topic of anti-Americanism by analyzing its history and currency in five key global regions: the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, East Asia, and the United States. The commentary draws from social science as well as the humanities for an in-depth study of anti-American opinion and sentiment in different cultures.
The questions raised by these essays force us to explore the new ways America must interact with the world after 9/11 and the war against Iraq.
Contributors: Greg Grandin, Mary Louise Pratt, Ana Maria Dopico, George Yudice, Timothy Mitchell, Ella Shohat, Mary Nolan, Patrick Deer, Vangelis Calotychos, Harry Harootunian, Hyun Ok Park, Rebecca E. Karl, Moss Roberts, Linda Gordon, and John Kuo Wei Tchen.

A groundbreaking history of anti-Semitism, from the Roman Empire to the twentieth century

The origins of anti-Semitism have been hotly contested. Some say that it is a transitory phenomenon, appearing randomly in Western history, while others argue that it reflects a deep-seated tradition inherent in Western culture. Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis argues that anti-semitism is not an anomaly in Western culture, but a defining feature.

In this collection of essays, 16 celebrated contributors trace representations of Jewish people over the past two thousand years. Their analysis shows how Jewish people have been consistently cast as outsiders, allowing Westerners to define themselves in contrast to the Jewish community. Even as the popular image of Jewish people changed, anti-semitism persisted. With essays on the religious, social, political, and economic origins of European and American anti- Semitism, as well as some Jewish responses, this volume is the most wide-ranging history of anti-Semitism ever compiled.

For more than thirty years Hafez al-Asad has ruled Syria with an iron fist. Six U.S. presidents and eight Israeli prime ministers have come and gone, but Asad remains, one of the last of the old generation of Arab leaders. But in the post-Cold War Middle East Asad and his country are faced with an array of bewildering choices. Will they allow greater civil liberties and economic liberalization, or assert strong, centralized one-party control of the state? Will they make peace with Israel, and at what price? Will they cement their growing relationship with the United States or return to the hostilities of the past?
Eyal Zisser tackles these questions and gets inside the mind of the man President Clinton called "the smartest leader in the Middle East." He also examines the peculiar dynamics of the Asad family with its Byzantine power plays and competing factions. He tells the fascinating story of how Asad struggles to appease his relatives and his clan while his son waits in the wings to assume power and his brother plots from abroad to gain control of the nation he regards as rightfully his.
Asad's Legacy is the most up-to-date, thorough treatment of Asad's role in the history and politics of the contemporary Middle East. Zisser sheds new light on the story of Asad's rule over his nation and points the way to the future of Syria and the entire region.

How is it possible for an innocent man to come within nine days of execution? An Expendable Man answers that question through detailed analysis of the case of Earl Washington Jr., a mentally retarded, black farm hand who was convicted of the 1983 rape and murder of a 19-year-old mother of three in Culpeper, Virginia. He spent almost 18 years in Virginia prisons—9 1/2 of them on death row—for a murder he did not commit.
This book reveals the relative ease with which individuals who live at society's margins can be wrongfully convicted, and the extraordinary difficulty of correcting such a wrong once it occurs.
Washington was eventually freed in February 2001 not because of the legal and judicial systems, but in spite of them. While DNA testing was central to his eventual pardon, such tests would never have occurred without an unusually talented and committed legal team and without a series of incidents that are best described as pure luck.
Margaret Edds makes the chilling argument that some other “expendable men” almost certainly have been less fortunate than Washington. This, she writes, is “the secret, shameful underbelly” of America's retention of capital punishment. Such wrongful executions may not happen often, but anyone who doubts that innocent people have been executed in the United States should remember the remarkable series of events necessary to save Earl Washington Jr. from such a fate.

Do animals have rights and, if so, what exactly are they? Further, how do these rights relate to human rights? These questions have long bedeviled scientists, philosophers, and animal advocates and today remain as contested as ever.
Combining the writings of leading academics and activists such as Peter Singer and Michael W. Fox, this anthology examines the development of animal rights discourse over the past quarter century to anticipate the future of the debate. Touching on every aspect of human-animal relations, from agriculture and animal experimentation to the animal rights movement in the United States and abroad, the contributors both question and affirm the utility of the concept of rights. Informing this volume is the belief that, regardless of where one stands on the issues of animal rights, it is simply indisputable that how we perceive and treat animals is fundamentally and inextricably related to how we define ourselves.

From the wooden teeth of George Washington to the Bly prosthesis, popular in the 1860s and boasting easy uniform motions of the limb, to today's lifelike approximations, prosthetic devices reveal the extent to which the evolution and design of technologies of the body are intertwined with both the practical and subjective needs of human beings.
The peculiar history of prosthetic devices sheds light on the relationship between technological change and the civilizing process of modernity, and analyzes the concrete materials of prosthetics which carry with them ideologies of body, ideals, body politics, and culture.
Simultaneously critiquing, historicizing, and theorizing prosthetics, Artificial Parts, Practical Lives lays out a balanced and complex picture of its subject, neither vilifying nor celebrating the merger of flesh and machine.

The story of the remarkable life of Civil Rights leader Bob Moses

From his role as one of the architects of the civil rights movement to his work with inner city children late into his life, Robert Moses was one of America's most courageous, energetic, and influential leaders. Wary of the cults of celebrity he saw surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and fueled by a philosophy that shunned leadership, Moses always labored behind the scenes. This first biography sheds significant light on the intellectual and philosophical worldview of a man who was rarely seen but whose work created a lasting impact on American life.

Moses spent almost three years in Mississippi trying to awaken the state's Black citizens to their moral and legal rights before the fateful summer of 1964 would thrust him and the Freedom Summer movement into the national spotlight. We follow him through the civil rights years—his intensive, fearless tradition of community organizing, his involvements with SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and his negotiations with the Department of Justice—to his time in Canada after fleeing the draft for a war he opposed, through the decade he spent teaching in Tanzania. Returning in 1977 under President Carter's amnesty program, Moses dedicated the rest of his life to the Algebra Project—an innovative program he established to teach math to Boston's inner-city youth, an important extension of his tireless pursuit of equal rights.

Quiet and intensely private, Moses quickly became legendary as a man whose conduct exemplified leadership by example. And Gently He Shall Lead Them tells the story of this remarkable man, an elusive hero of the civil rights movement whose flight from adulation only served to increase his reputation as an intellectual and moral leader.

The achievements and challenges of the world's largest multilateral donor population programs

In the thirty years since the United Nations Population Fund was founded, overall population growth rates have slowed, infant and maternal mortality have been reduced, and women have achieved improved access to reproductive health services. Yet, a multitude of problems remain, including the aging of Western European populations and the growth of others in the Third World, the impact of AIDS, and increases in migration and refugees.

An Agenda for People examines the past achievements as well as the current and future challenges of the world's largest multilateral donor population programs. Through essays by experts in the field of development, this book tackles a series of probing questions. How has the Fund evolved and built global support? How have the major international conferences on population and environments shaped the global population agenda? What is the relationship between reproductive rights and human rights? What are the links between population and resource use and abuse? And how does the Fund help to integrate impoverished populations into national development strategies?

This book provides an invaluable assessment of the state of world population programs and a fascinating look into the future of community development.

Contributors include Tevia Abrams, John Caldwell, Sylvie Cohen, Rebecca Cook, Mahmoud Fathalla, Noeleen heyzer, Don Hinrichsen, Stafford Mousky, Mohammad Nizamuddin, Fred Sai, Sara Sems, Steven W. Sinding, Jyoti Shankar Singh, and Bradman Weerakoon.

An examination into the social influences that have prolonged youth in today's adults

Why are today's adults more like adolescents, in their dress and personal tastes, than ever before? Why do so many adults seem to drift and avoid responsibilities such as work and family? As the traditional family breaks down and marriage and child rearing are delayed, what makes a person an adult?Many people in the industrial West are simply not "growing up" in the traditional sense. Instead, they pursue personal, individual fulfillment and emerge from a vague and prolonged youth into a vague and insecure adulthood. The transition to adulthood is becoming more hazardous, and the destination is becoming more difficult to reach, if it is reached at all. Arrested Adulthood examines the variety of young people's responses to this new situation. James E. Côté shows us adults who allow the profit-driven industries of mass culture to provide the structure that is missing, as their lives become more individualistic and atomized. He also shows adults who resist anomie and build their world around their sense of personal connectedness to others. Finally, Côté provides a vision of a truly progressive society in which all members can develop their potentials apart from the influence of the market. In so doing, he gives us a clearer vision of what it means to be an adult and makes sense of the longest, but least understood period of the life course.

As the world grapples with issues of religious fanaticism, extremist politics, and rampant violence that seek justification in either “religious” or “secular” discourses, women who claim Islam as a vehicle for individual and social change are often either regarded as pious subjects who subscribe to an ideology that denies them many modern freedoms, or as feminist subjects who seek empowerment only through rejecting religion and adopting secularist discourses. Such assumptions emerge from a common trend in the literature to categorize the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ as polarizing categories, which in turn mitigates the identities, experiences and actions of women in Islamic societies. Yet in actuality Muslim women whose activism is grounded in Islam draw equally on principles associated with secularism.
In An Islam of Her Own, Sherine Hafez focuses on women’s Islamic activism in Egypt to challenge these binary representations of religious versus secular subjectivities. Drawing on six non-consecutive years of ethnographic fieldwork within a women's Islamic movement in Cairo, Hafez analyzes the ways in which women who participate in Islamic activism narrate their selfhood, articulate their desires, and embody discourses in which the boundaries are blurred between the religious and the secular.

After 9/11, there was an increase in both the incidence of hate crimes and government policies that targeted Arabs and Muslims and the proliferation of sympathetic portrayals of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media. Arabs and Muslims in the Media examines this paradox and investigates the increase of sympathetic images of “the enemy” during the War on Terror.





Evelyn Alsultany explains that a new standard in racial and cultural representations emerged out of the multicultural movement of the 1990s that involves balancing a negative representation with a positive one, what she refers to as “simplified complex representations.” This has meant that if the storyline of a TV drama or film represents an Arab or Muslim as a terrorist, then the storyline also includes a “positive” representation of an Arab, Muslim, Arab American, or Muslim American to offset the potential stereotype. Analyzing how TV dramas such as The Practice, 24, Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and Sleeper Cell, news-reporting, and non-profit advertising have represented Arabs, Muslims, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans during the War on Terror, this book demonstrates how more diverse representations do not in themselves solve the problem of racial stereotyping and how even seemingly positive images can produce meanings that can justify exclusion and inequality.

Over the past three decades, the United States has embraced the death penalty with tenacious enthusiasm. While most of those countries whose legal systems and cultures are normally compared to the United States have abolished capital punishment, the United States continues to employ this ultimate tool of punishment. The death penalty has achieved an unparalleled prominence in our public life and left an indelible imprint on our politics and culture. It has also provoked intense scholarly debate, much of it devoted to explaining the roots of American exceptionalism.
America’s Death Penalty takes a different approach to the issue by examining the historical and theoretical assumptions that have underpinned the discussion of capital punishment in the United States today. At various times the death penalty has been portrayed as an anachronism, an inheritance, or an innovation, with little reflection on the consequences that flow from the choice of words. This volume represents an effort to restore the sense of capital punishment as a question caught up in history. Edited by leading scholars of crime and justice, these original essays pursue different strategies for unsettling the usual terms of the debate. In particular, the authors use comparative and historical investigations of both Europe and America in order to cast fresh light on familiar questions about the meaning of capital punishment. This volume is essential reading for understanding the death penalty in America.
Contributors: David Garland, Douglas Hay, Randall McGowen, Michael Meranze, Rebecca McLennan, and Jonathan Simon.

An Introduction to Political Thought emphasizes a dual approach to political theory by providing a chronological overview of both major figures and texts as well as an understanding of the development of key concepts and themes. In this way the authors provide a basic sense of the history and development of political thought and a critical grasp of the theoretical and philosophical issues at the heart of politics.
Beginning with the idea that laws and constitutions are only beneficial insofar as they give effective expression to our moral and political beliefs, the authors argue that moral and political ideas are the foundations of politics. Political philosophers covered in depth include: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Bentham, Rawls, and Burke. Key concepts such as the moral order, liberty, human nature, freedom, the social contract, distributive justice, liberalism, socialism, feminism, human rights, and multiculturalism are also all covered. In exploring these issues the authors offer a critical guide through key arguments in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory.

An examination into the history of modern parenting

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a dramatic shift in the role of children in American society and families. No longer necessary for labor, children became economic liabilities and twentieth-century parents exhibited a new level of anxiety concerning the welfare of their children and their own ability to parent effectively. What caused this shift in the ways parenting and childhood were experienced and perceived? Why, at a time of relative ease and prosperity, do parents continue to grapple with uncertainty and with unreasonable expectations of both themselves and their children?

Peter N. Stearns explains this phenomenon by examining the new issues the twentieth century brought to bear on families. Surveying popular media, "expert” childrearing manuals, and newspapers and journals published throughout the century, Stearns shows how schooling, physical and emotional vulnerability, and the rise in influence of commercialism became primary concerns for parents. The result, Stearns shows, is that contemporary parents have come to believe that they are participating in a culture of neglect and diminishing standards. Anxious Parents: A Modern History of Childrearing in America shows the reasons for this belief through an historic examination of modern parenting.

This book provides a broad and balanced introduction to the principle Western financial makets and institutions. Unlike other books which tend to focus on an individual market, An Introduction to Western Financial Markets is international in scope. Valdez acknowledges the current movement towards a single global market and recognizes that a parochial knowledge of just one local market is no longer sufficient.
Various financial sectors are described in clear and easy to understand terms. Topics covered include banking (commercial and investment), money and bond markets, foreign exchange, stock markets, finance for trade, insurance options, futures, and other derivative products. A final chapter surveys the key trends and issues in the markets today. A useful glossary of terms is included.
Pages of mathematical formulae, common in introductory books on finance, are avoided. Valdez clearly shows the importance of these formulae, but is constantly aware of his non-numeric readers. This book will appeal to students of banking, finance, economics, business studies and the securities markets.

In 1933 Americans did something they had never done before: they voted to repeal an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Eighteenth Amendment, which for 13 years had prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, was nullified by the passage of another amendment, the Twenty-First. Many factors helped create this remarkable turn of events. One factor that was essential, Kenneth D. Rose here argues, was the presence of a large number of well-organized women promoting repeal.
Even more remarkable than the appearance of these women on the political scene was the approach they took to the politics of repeal. Intriguingly, the arguments employed by repeal women and by prohibition women were often mirror images of each other, even though the women on the two sides of the issue pursued diametrically opposed political agendas. Rose contends that a distinguishing feature of the women's repeal movement was an argument for home protection, a social feminist ideology that women repealists shared with the prohibitionist women of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The book surveys the women's movement to repeal national prohibition and places it within the contexts of women's temperance activity, women's political activity during the 1920s, and the campaign for repeal.
While recent years have seen much-needed attention devoted to the recovery of women's history, conservative women have too often been overlooked, deliberately ignored, or written off as unworthy of scrutiny. With American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition, Kenneth Rose fleshes out a crucial chapter in the history of American women and culture.

As the world grapples with issues of religious fanaticism, extremist politics, and rampant violence that seek justification in either “religious” or “secular” discourses, women who claim Islam as a vehicle for individual and social change are often either regarded as pious subjects who subscribe to an ideology that denies them many modern freedoms, or as feminist subjects who seek empowerment only through rejecting religion and adopting secularist discourses. Such assumptions emerge from a common trend in the literature to categorize the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ as polarizing categories, which in turn mitigates the identities, experiences and actions of women in Islamic societies. Yet in actuality Muslim women whose activism is grounded in Islam draw equally on principles associated with secularism.
In An Islam of Her Own, Sherine Hafez focuses on women’s Islamic activism in Egypt to challenge these binary representations of religious versus secular subjectivities. Drawing on six non-consecutive years of ethnographic fieldwork within a women's Islamic movement in Cairo, Hafez analyzes the ways in which women who participate in Islamic activism narrate their selfhood, articulate their desires, and embody discourses in which the boundaries are blurred between the religious and the secular.

A groundbreaking history of anti-Semitism, from the Roman Empire to the twentieth century

The origins of anti-Semitism have been hotly contested. Some say that it is a transitory phenomenon, appearing randomly in Western history, while others argue that it reflects a deep-seated tradition inherent in Western culture. Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis argues that anti-semitism is not an anomaly in Western culture, but a defining feature.

In this collection of essays, 16 celebrated contributors trace representations of Jewish people over the past two thousand years. Their analysis shows how Jewish people have been consistently cast as outsiders, allowing Westerners to define themselves in contrast to the Jewish community. Even as the popular image of Jewish people changed, anti-semitism persisted. With essays on the religious, social, political, and economic origins of European and American anti- Semitism, as well as some Jewish responses, this volume is the most wide-ranging history of anti-Semitism ever compiled.

Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Rolando Hinojosa, E. Annie Proulx, Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland, and Thomas Pynchon: An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction introduces the work of a range of key American authors, all of whom can be said to engage with postmodernism. Exploring the vitality and energy of contemporary writing in light of pessimistic proclamations on the state of postmodern American culture, Bilton highlights the tension between "realistic" description and linguistic self-consciousness in contemporary fiction.
In addition, by addressing a central problem in literary theory—its neglect of literary discussion and the practice of reading—An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction is able to present a working model for reading a text theoretically.
As an introductory text, it assumes no prior knowledge of the authors of the novels discussed. To encourage understanding and aid further study, the following features are included:
* GLOSSARY OF CRITICAL AND LITERARY TERMS
* BIBLIOGRAPHY OF EACH AUTHOR'S WORKS
* BIOGRAPHY OF EACH AUTHOR
* GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
* THEMATIC AND AUTHOR INDICES

An Introduction to Political Thought emphasizes a dual approach to political theory by providing a chronological overview of both major figures and texts as well as an understanding of the development of key concepts and themes. In this way the authors provide a basic sense of the history and development of political thought and a critical grasp of the theoretical and philosophical issues at the heart of politics.
Beginning with the idea that laws and constitutions are only beneficial insofar as they give effective expression to our moral and political beliefs, the authors argue that moral and political ideas are the foundations of politics. Political philosophers covered in depth include: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Bentham, Rawls, and Burke. Key concepts such as the moral order, liberty, human nature, freedom, the social contract, distributive justice, liberalism, socialism, feminism, human rights, and multiculturalism are also all covered. In exploring these issues the authors offer a critical guide through key arguments in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory.

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.
This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross—or are crossed by—what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus' ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.
An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.
Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O'Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

From nineteenth-century romantic friendships to childhood best friends and idealistic versions of feminist sisterhood, female friendship has been seen as an essential, sustaining influence on women's lives. Women are thought to have a special aptitude for making and keeping friends.
But notions of friendship are not constant-and neither are women's experiences of this fundamental form of connection. In Another Self, Linda W. Rosenzweig sheds light on the changing nature of white middle-class American women's relationships during the coming of age of modern America.
As the middle-class domesticity of the nineteenth century waned, a new emotional culture arose in the twentieth century and the intensely affectionate bonds between women of earlier decades were supplanted by new priorities: autonomy, careers, participation in an expanding consumer culture, and the expectation of fulfillment and companionship in marriage. An increased emphasis on heterosexual interactions and a growing stigmatization of close same-sex relationships fostered new friendship styles and patterns.
Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including diaries, journals, correspondence, and popular periodicals, Rosenzweig uncovers the complex and intricate links between social and cultural developments and women's personal experiences of friendship.

How is it possible for an innocent man to come within nine days of execution? An Expendable Man answers that question through detailed analysis of the case of Earl Washington Jr., a mentally retarded, black farm hand who was convicted of the 1983 rape and murder of a 19-year-old mother of three in Culpeper, Virginia. He spent almost 18 years in Virginia prisons—9 1/2 of them on death row—for a murder he did not commit.
This book reveals the relative ease with which individuals who live at society's margins can be wrongfully convicted, and the extraordinary difficulty of correcting such a wrong once it occurs.
Washington was eventually freed in February 2001 not because of the legal and judicial systems, but in spite of them. While DNA testing was central to his eventual pardon, such tests would never have occurred without an unusually talented and committed legal team and without a series of incidents that are best described as pure luck.
Margaret Edds makes the chilling argument that some other “expendable men” almost certainly have been less fortunate than Washington. This, she writes, is “the secret, shameful underbelly” of America's retention of capital punishment. Such wrongful executions may not happen often, but anyone who doubts that innocent people have been executed in the United States should remember the remarkable series of events necessary to save Earl Washington Jr. from such a fate.

Animal and Shaman presents a comparative survey of the ancient customs and religions of Central Asia. The Pre-Christian and Pre-Muslim peoples of the region, such as the Huns, Scythians, Turks, Mongols, Manchus, Finns and Hungarians, shared a number of traditions and rituals. Characteristics observed by anthropologists today may be traced directly back to an ancient past.
In ancient times there were remarkable commonalities in the forms of worship and spiritual expression among the different peoples of Inner Eurasia, all largely based on the role of animals in their lives. The harsh physical climate of the region led to an emphasis on hunting and animals, in contrast to the fertility rites common in more agriculturally hospitable areas. These characteristics have survived not only in the legends of the region, but have also found their way into the mythologies of the West. Baldick proposes that the myths, rituals, and epics of Central Asia served as possible foundations for such great works at the Odyssey, the Gospels, and Beowulf, which seem to have precursors in Iranian and Inner Eurasian tales.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2002
Community organizing became an integral part of the activist repertoire of the New Left in the 1960s. Students for a Democratic Society, the organization that came to be seen as synonymous with the white New Left, began community organizing in 1963, hoping to build an interracial movement of the poor through which to demand social and political change. SDS sought nothing less than to abolish poverty and extend democratic participation in America.
Over the next five years, organizers established a strong presence in numerous low-income, racially diverse urban neighborhoods in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, and Boston, as well as other cities. Rejecting the strategies of the old left and labor movement and inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, activists sought to combine a number of single issues into a broader, more powerful coalition. Organizers never limited themselves to today's simple dichotomies of race vs. class or of identity politics vs. economic inequality. They actively synthesized emerging identity politics with class and coalition politics and with a drive for a more participatory welfare state, treating these diverse political approaches as inextricably intertwined. While common wisdom holds that the New Left rejected all state involvement as cooptative at best, Jennifer Frost traces the ways in which New Left and community activists did in fact put forward a prescriptive, even visionary, alternative to the welfare state.
After Students for a Democratic Society and its community organizing unit, the Economic Research and Action Project, disbanded, New Left and community participants went on to apply their strategies and goals to the welfare rights, women’s liberation, and the antiwar movements. In her study of activism before the age of identity politics, Frost has given us the first full-fledged history of what was arguably the most innovative community organizing campaign in post-war American history.

Fresh insights into the ongoing fascination with dinosaurs and their place in 19th century American nationalism

In 1801, the first complete mastodon skeleton was excavated in the Hudson River Valley, marking the climax of a century-long debate in America and Europe over the identity of a mysterious creature known as the American Incognitum. Long before the dinosaurs were discovered and the notion of geological time acquired currency, many citizens of the new republic believed this mythical beast to be a ferocious carnivore, capable of crushing deer and elk in its "monstrous grinders." During the American Revolution, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson avidly collected its bones; for the founding fathers, its massive jaws symbolized the violence of the natural world and the emerging nation's own dreams of conquest.

Paul Semonin's lively history of this icon of American nationalism focuses on the link between patriotism and prehistoric nature. From the first fist-sized tooth found in 1705, which Puritan clergyman claimed was evidence of human giants, to the scientific racialism associated with the discovery of extinct species, Semonin traces the evangelical beliefs, Enlightenment thought, and Indian myths which led the founding fathers to view this prehistoric monster as a symbol of nationhood.

Semonin also sees the mystery of the mastodon in early America as a cautionary tale about the first flowering of our narcissistic fascination with a prehistoric nature ruled by ferocious carnivores. As such, American Monster offers fresh insights into the genesis of the ongoing fascination with dinosaurs.

The achievements and challenges of the world's largest multilateral donor population programs

In the thirty years since the United Nations Population Fund was founded, overall population growth rates have slowed, infant and maternal mortality have been reduced, and women have achieved improved access to reproductive health services. Yet, a multitude of problems remain, including the aging of Western European populations and the growth of others in the Third World, the impact of AIDS, and increases in migration and refugees.

An Agenda for People examines the past achievements as well as the current and future challenges of the world's largest multilateral donor population programs. Through essays by experts in the field of development, this book tackles a series of probing questions. How has the Fund evolved and built global support? How have the major international conferences on population and environments shaped the global population agenda? What is the relationship between reproductive rights and human rights? What are the links between population and resource use and abuse? And how does the Fund help to integrate impoverished populations into national development strategies?

This book provides an invaluable assessment of the state of world population programs and a fascinating look into the future of community development.

Contributors include Tevia Abrams, John Caldwell, Sylvie Cohen, Rebecca Cook, Mahmoud Fathalla, Noeleen heyzer, Don Hinrichsen, Stafford Mousky, Mohammad Nizamuddin, Fred Sai, Sara Sems, Steven W. Sinding, Jyoti Shankar Singh, and Bradman Weerakoon.

A comprehensive look at the news landscape that positions digital as the new hope for mainstream media prestige

The news media in the late twentieth century has become increasingly sensational and irrelevant to the lives of the American public. Network news shows frequently resemble entertainment programs, and major newspapers often fail to serve the interests of their communities. Young people in particular are casting aside newspapers and television news for computerized information and entertainment. In the wake of this shift, the convergence of digital technology, computing, and telecommunications has given rise to a new form of journalism: digital news.

And That's The Way It Will Be argues convincingly that digital journalism has the potential to reverse the decline in prestige of the mainstream media. Focusing on the public's dissatisfaction with traditional communication sources, seasoned journalist Christopher Harper evaluates computers as a means of providing and receiving news and information.

Harper profiles some of the key players in the world of digital journalism including Microsoft, America Online, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and Time Warner. He assesses the impact of digital news in poor neighborhoods and the developing world and explores the issues of pornography, privacy, and government regulation of the Internet's news and information system. The volume closes with predictions about the future by presidents of communications organizations, computer experts, network news anchors, software developers, columnists, on-line editors, and Web designers.

The first book to focus exclusively on the nature and future of journalism in an electronic age, And That's The Way It Will Be provides a comprehensive look at the emergence, challenges, and promise of digital news.

Americans Without Law shows how the racial boundaries of civic life are based on widespread perceptions about the relative capacity of minority groups for legal behavior, which Mark S. Weiner calls “juridical racialism.” The book follows the history of this civic discourse by examining the legal status of four minority groups in four successive historical periods: American Indians in the 1880s, Filipinos after the Spanish-American War, Japanese immigrants in the 1920s, and African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s.
Weiner reveals the significance of juridical racialism for each group and, in turn, Americans as a whole by examining the work of anthropological social scientists who developed distinctive ways of understanding racial and legal identity, and through decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that put these ethno-legal views into practice. Combining history, anthropology, and legal analysis, the book argues that the story of juridical racialism shows how race and citizenship served as a nexus for the professionalization of the social sciences, the growth of national state power, economic modernization, and modern practices of the self.

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.
This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross—or are crossed by—what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus' ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.
An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.
Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O'Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

Since the fall of communism, laissez-faire capitalism has experienced renewed popularity. Flush with victory, the United States has embraced a particularly narrow and single-minded definition of capitalism and aggressively exported it worldwide. The defining trait of this brand of capitalism is an unwavering reverence for the icons of the market. Although promoted as a laissez-faire form of capitalism, it actually reflects the very evils of selfishness and greed by entrepreneurs that concerned Adam Smith.
Capitalism, however, can thrive without an extreme emphasis on efficiency and personal autonomy. Americans often forget that theirs is a rather peculiar form of capitalism, that other Western nations successfully maintain capitalistic systems that are fundamentally more balanced and nuanced in their effect on society. The unnecessarily inhumane aspects of American capitalism become apparent when compared to Canadian and Western European societies, with their more generous policies regarding affirmative action, accommodation for disabled persons, and family and medical leave for pregnant woman and their partners.
In American Law in the Age of Hypercapitalism, Ruth Colker examines how American law purports to reflect--and actively promotes--a laissez-faire capitalism that disproportionately benefits the entrepreneurial class. Colker proposes that the quality of American life depends also on fairness and equality rather than simply the single-minded and formulaic pursuit of efficiency and utility.

It
is generally accepted that Jews and evangelical Christians have little in
common. Yet special alliances developed
between the two groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Evangelicals
viewed Jews as both the rightful heirs of Israel and as a group who failed to
recognize their true savior. Consequently, they set out to influence the course
of Jewish life by attempting to evangelize Jews and to facilitate their return
to Palestine. Their double-edged perception caused unprecedented political,
cultural, and theological meeting points that have revolutionized
Christian-Jewish relationships. An Unusual Relationship explores the
beliefs and political agendas that evangelicals have created in order to affect
the future of the Jews. Additionally, it analyses Jewish opinions and reactions
to those efforts, as well as those of other religious groups, such as Arab
Christians.



This
volume offers a fascinating, comprehensive analysis of the roots,
manifestations, and consequences of evangelical interest in the Jews, and the
alternatives they provide to conventional historical Christian-Jewish
interactions. It also provides a compelling understanding of Middle Eastern
politics through a new lens.

This concise, comprehensive primer on modern American social and political thought is the ideal introduction to the rich intellectual tradition of the United Sates. Andreas Hess helps the reader to understand of American culture and politics through careful exploration of key and theorists.

In the first half of the book he focuses on the core traditions of American social and political thought American exceptionalism, Calvinist Protestantism, republicanism, liberalism and 20th century pragmatism. The second half of the book applies these traditions to a broad range of 20th century conditions and issues power and democracy, justice and injustice, multiculturalism and pluralism, civil society, social theory and the role of the intellectual. The works of some of the most influential figures in the field, such as De Tocqueville, Lipset, Arendt, Hartz, Pocock, Dewey, Moore, Rawls, Walzer, Rorty and Alexander, are drawn upon to illustrate the theories and issues being discussed. Accessibly written and jargon free, this treatment will be useful for students and scholars alike.

This volume presents 455 inscribed pottery fragments, or ostraka,
found during NYU’s excavations at Amheida in the western desert of Egypt. The
majority date to the Late Roman period (3rd to 4th century AD), a time of rapid
social change in Egypt and the ancient Mediterranean generally. Amheida was a
small administrative center, and the full publication of these brief texts
illuminates the role of writing in the daily lives of its inhabitants. The
subjects covered by the Amheida ostraka include the distribution of food, the
administration of wells, the commercial lives of inhabitants, their education,
and other aspects of life neglected in literary sources. The authors provide a
full introduction to the technical aspects of terminology and chronology, while
also situating this important evidence in its historical, social and regional
context.





Online edition available as part of the NYU Library's Ancient World Digital Library and in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).

Americans Without Law shows how the racial boundaries of civic life are based on widespread perceptions about the relative capacity of minority groups for legal behavior, which Mark S. Weiner calls “juridical racialism.” The book follows the history of this civic discourse by examining the legal status of four minority groups in four successive historical periods: American Indians in the 1880s, Filipinos after the Spanish-American War, Japanese immigrants in the 1920s, and African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s.
Weiner reveals the significance of juridical racialism for each group and, in turn, Americans as a whole by examining the work of anthropological social scientists who developed distinctive ways of understanding racial and legal identity, and through decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that put these ethno-legal views into practice. Combining history, anthropology, and legal analysis, the book argues that the story of juridical racialism shows how race and citizenship served as a nexus for the professionalization of the social sciences, the growth of national state power, economic modernization, and modern practices of the self.

Many of us belong to communities that have been scarred by terrible calamities. And many of us come from families that have suffered grievous losses. How we reflect on these legacies of loss and the ways they inform each other are the questions Laura Levitt takes up in this provocative and passionate book.
An American Jew whose family was not directly affected by the Holocaust, Levitt grapples with the challenges of contending with ordinary Jewish loss. She suggests that although the memory of the Holocaust may seem to overshadow all other kinds of loss for American Jews, it can also open up possibilities for engaging these more personal and everyday legacies.
Weaving in discussions of her own family stories and writing in a manner that is both deeply personal and erudite, Levitt shows what happens when public and private losses are seen next to each other, and what happens when difficult works of art or commemoration, such as museum exhibits or films, are seen alongside ordinary family stories about more intimate losses. In so doing she illuminates how through these “ordinary stories” we may create an alternative model for confronting Holocaust memory in Jewish culture.

African American Muslims and South Asian Muslim immigrants are two of the largest ethnic Muslim groups in the U.S. Yet there are few sites in which African Americans and South Asian immigrants come together, and South Asians are often held up as a “model minority” against African Americans. However, the American ummah, or American Muslim community, stands as a unique site for interethnic solidarity in a time of increased tensions between native-born Americans and immigrants.
This ethnographic study of African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims in Chicago and Atlanta explores how Islamic ideals of racial harmony and equality create hopeful possibilities in an American society that remains challenged by race and class inequalities. The volume focuses on women who, due to gender inequalities, are sometimes more likely to move outside of their ethnic Muslim spaces and interact with other Muslim ethnic groups in search of gender justice.
American Muslim Women explores the relationships and sometimes alliances between African Americans and South Asian immigrants, drawing on interviews with a diverse group of women from these two communities. Karim investigates what it means to negotiate religious sisterhood against America's race and class hierarchies, and how those in the American Muslim community both construct and cross ethnic boundaries.
American Muslim Women reveals the ways in which multiple forms of identity frame the American Muslim experience, in some moments reinforcing ethnic boundaries, and at other times, resisting them.

The precise legal nature of the relationship between the United States and the people of Puerto Rico was not explicitly determined in 1898 when the Treaty of Paris transferred sovereignty over Puerto Rico from Spain to the United States. Since then, many court cases, beginning in 1901, have been instrumental in defining this delicate relationship.
While the legislation has clearly established the nonexistence of Puerto Rican nationhood and lack of independent Puerto Rican citizenship, the debate over Puerto Rico's status continues to this day.
Malavet offers a critique of Puerto Rico’s current status as well as of its treatment by the U.S. legal and political systems. Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, and Puerto Ricans living on this geographically separate island are subject to the United States’s legal and political authority. They are the largest group of U.S. citizens currently living under territorial status. Malavet argues that the Puerto Rican cultural nation experiences U.S. imperialism, which compromises both the island's sovereignty and Puerto Ricans’ citizenship rights. He analyzes the three alternatives to Puerto Rico's continued territorial status, examining the challenges manifest in each possibility, as well as illuminating what he believes to be the best course of action.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2002
Community organizing became an integral part of the activist repertoire of the New Left in the 1960s. Students for a Democratic Society, the organization that came to be seen as synonymous with the white New Left, began community organizing in 1963, hoping to build an interracial movement of the poor through which to demand social and political change. SDS sought nothing less than to abolish poverty and extend democratic participation in America.
Over the next five years, organizers established a strong presence in numerous low-income, racially diverse urban neighborhoods in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, and Boston, as well as other cities. Rejecting the strategies of the old left and labor movement and inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, activists sought to combine a number of single issues into a broader, more powerful coalition. Organizers never limited themselves to today's simple dichotomies of race vs. class or of identity politics vs. economic inequality. They actively synthesized emerging identity politics with class and coalition politics and with a drive for a more participatory welfare state, treating these diverse political approaches as inextricably intertwined. While common wisdom holds that the New Left rejected all state involvement as cooptative at best, Jennifer Frost traces the ways in which New Left and community activists did in fact put forward a prescriptive, even visionary, alternative to the welfare state.
After Students for a Democratic Society and its community organizing unit, the Economic Research and Action Project, disbanded, New Left and community participants went on to apply their strategies and goals to the welfare rights, women’s liberation, and the antiwar movements. In her study of activism before the age of identity politics, Frost has given us the first full-fledged history of what was arguably the most innovative community organizing campaign in post-war American history.

This reader provides substantial extracts from the core texts in the field of American social and political thought. It demonstrates the rich intellectual tradition of the United States, giving an unparalleled understanding of American society and politics through the reproduction of key writings from a wide variety of thinkers.

The first part covers the core traditions of American social and political thought—American Exceptionalism, Political Theology, Republicanism, Liberalism, and Pragmatism. In the second part, texts have been selected to demonstrate the ways in which these traditions have been applied to a broad range of issues and conditions.

Exceptionally well-written and jargon-free, with helpful introductions and selections from Frederick Jackson Turner, Max Weber, Michael Sandel, John Rawls, C. Wright Mills, Sheldon Wolin, Judith N. Shklar, bell hooks, Michael Walzer and Richard Rorty, among others, American Social and Political Thought will be the core text in the field.

A history of the origins of the 14th Amendment and the the man who helped craft it

John Bingham was the architect of the rebirth of the United States following the Civil War. A leading antislavery lawyer and congressman from Ohio, Bingham wrote the most important part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees fundamental rights and equality to all Americans. He was also at the center of two of the greatest trials in history, giving the closing argument in the military prosecution of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and in the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. And more than any other man, Bingham played the key role in shaping the Union’s policy towards the occupied ex-Confederate States, with consequences that still haunt our politics.

American Founding Son provides the most complete portrait yet of this remarkable statesman. Drawing on his personal letters and speeches, the book traces Bingham’s life from his humble roots in Pennsylvania through his career as a leader of the Republican Party. Gerard N. Magliocca argues that Bingham and his congressional colleagues transformed the Constitution that the Founding Fathers created, and did so with the same ingenuity that their forbears used to create a more perfect union in the 1780s. In this book, Magliocca restores Bingham to his rightful place as one of our great leaders.

The essays Professor Summers has brought together in this book consist of various authentic and representative formulations and applications of the dominant general theory of law and its use in the United States during the middle decades of the 20th century. The book includes a number of major contributions that are critical of that theory. The contributors are: The path of the law, Oliver Wendell Homes Jr. Force and coercion; Logical method and law, John Dewey. The need of a sociological jurisprudence; Mechanical jurisprudence; The possibility of a measure of values, Roscoe Pound. What is the law, Joseph W. Binham. A return to stare decisis, Herman Oliphant. A realistic jurisprudence-the next step; The normative, the legal, and the law-jobs: the problem of juristic method, K.N. Lewellyn. The problems of a functional jurisprudence, Felix S. Cohen. The causes of popular dissatisfaction with the administration of justice, Roscoe Pound. The judiciality of minimum-wage legislation, Thomas Red Powell. An institutional approach to the law of commercial banking, Underhill Moore and Theodore S. Hope Jr. Through title to contract and a bit beyond, K.N. Llewellyn. Williston on contracts; The logical and legal bases of the conflict of laws, Walter Wheeler Cook. American legal realism, L.L. Fuller. Legal rules: their function in the process of decision, John Dickenson. Some rationalism about realism, Hermann Kantorwicz. Pragmatic instumentalism in twentieth century American legal thought-a synthesis and critique of our dominant general theory about law and its use.

This concise, comprehensive primer on modern American social and political thought is the ideal introduction to the rich intellectual tradition of the United Sates. Andreas Hess helps the reader to understand of American culture and politics through careful exploration of key and theorists.

In the first half of the book he focuses on the core traditions of American social and political thought American exceptionalism, Calvinist Protestantism, republicanism, liberalism and 20th century pragmatism. The second half of the book applies these traditions to a broad range of 20th century conditions and issues power and democracy, justice and injustice, multiculturalism and pluralism, civil society, social theory and the role of the intellectual. The works of some of the most influential figures in the field, such as De Tocqueville, Lipset, Arendt, Hartz, Pocock, Dewey, Moore, Rawls, Walzer, Rorty and Alexander, are drawn upon to illustrate the theories and issues being discussed. Accessibly written and jargon free, this treatment will be useful for students and scholars alike.

Emotions lie at our very core as human beings. How we process and grapple with our emotions, how and what we emote, and how we respond to the emotions of others, constitute the essence of our social universe. In a very real sense, we exist only through the prism of our emotions.
And yet the profound effect of human emotion on history, politics, religion, and culture, remains underexamined. While the influence of emotion in such realms as American foreign policy has been well-documented, other emotional aspects of American history have escaped notice. What role, for instance, does emotion have in the practice of African American religion? How do shame and self- hatred influence American conceptions of identity? How does our emotional life change as we age? To what degree is American consumerism driven by basic human emotion?
With this landmark anthology, historians Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis provide a road map of the American emotional landscape. From the emotional world of working-class Massachusetts to the prayers of evangelical and pentecostal women and the gendered nature of black rage, these essays provide a multicultural snapshot of the unique nature, and evolution, of American emotions.

African American Muslims and South Asian Muslim immigrants are two of the largest ethnic Muslim groups in the U.S. Yet there are few sites in which African Americans and South Asian immigrants come together, and South Asians are often held up as a “model minority” against African Americans. However, the American ummah, or American Muslim community, stands as a unique site for interethnic solidarity in a time of increased tensions between native-born Americans and immigrants.
This ethnographic study of African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims in Chicago and Atlanta explores how Islamic ideals of racial harmony and equality create hopeful possibilities in an American society that remains challenged by race and class inequalities. The volume focuses on women who, due to gender inequalities, are sometimes more likely to move outside of their ethnic Muslim spaces and interact with other Muslim ethnic groups in search of gender justice.
American Muslim Women explores the relationships and sometimes alliances between African Americans and South Asian immigrants, drawing on interviews with a diverse group of women from these two communities. Karim investigates what it means to negotiate religious sisterhood against America's race and class hierarchies, and how those in the American Muslim community both construct and cross ethnic boundaries.
American Muslim Women reveals the ways in which multiple forms of identity frame the American Muslim experience, in some moments reinforcing ethnic boundaries, and at other times, resisting them.

American Rabbi provides a comprehensive and insightful assessment of Rabbi Jacob Agus' standing as a notable Jewish thinker. The volume brings together original writings by a range of distinguished contributors to consider the main aspects of Agus' life and work in detail and to flesh out the broad and repercussive themes of his corpus. Taken as a whole, they present a broad and substantial picture of a remarkable American Rabbi and scholar, illuminating Agus' committment to Jewish people everywhere, his profound and unwavering spirituality, his continual reminders of the very real dangers of pseudo-messianism and misplaced romantic zeal, and his willingness to take politically and religiously unpopular stands.
Formulated as a companion volume to The Essential Agus, which presents selections of Agus' own writings, the contributors' analyses are based on specific selections of Agus' work which appear in The Essential Agus. Though each volume stands on its own, they are closely interconnected and readers will benefit from consulting both works.

Winner of the 2010 Book Award from the New England Historical Association
American constitutionalism represents this country’s greatest gift to human freedom, yet its story remains largely untold. For over two hundred years, its ideals, ideas, and institutions influenced different peoples in different lands at different times. American constitutionalism and the revolutionary republican documents on which it is based affected countless countries by helping them develop their own constitutional democracies. Western constitutionalism—of which America was a part along with Britain and France—reached a major turning point in global history in 1989, when the forces of democracy exceeded the forces of autocracy for the first time.
Historian George Athan Billias traces the spread of American constitutionalism—from Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean region, to Asia and Africa—beginning chronologically with the American Revolution and the fateful "shot heard round the world" and ending with the conclusion of the Cold War in 1989. The American model contributed significantly by spearheading the drive to greater democracy throughout the Western world, and Billias’s landmark study tells a story that will change the way readers view the important role American constitutionalism played during this era.

“It gives me a secret pleasure to observe the fair character our family has in the place by Jews & Christians,“Abigail Levy Franks wrote to her son from New York City in 1733. Abigail was part of a tiny community of Jews living in the new world. In the centuries that followed, as that community swelled to several millions, women came to occupy diverse and changing roles.
American Jewish Women’s History, an anthology covering colonial times to the present, illuminates that historical diversity. It shows women shaping Judaism and their American Jewish communities as they engaged in volunteer activities and political crusades, battled stereotypes, and constructed relationships with their Christian neighbors. It ranges from Rebecca Gratz’s development of the Jewish Sunday School in Philadelphia in 1838 to protest the rising prices of kosher meat at the turn of the century, to the shaping of southern Jewish women's cultural identity through food. There is currently no other reader conveying the breadth of the historical experiences of American Jewish women available.
The reader is divided into four sections complete with detailed introductions. The contributors include: Joyce Antler, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Alice Kessler-Harris, Paula E. Hyman, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan D. Sarna.

Since the fall of communism, laissez-faire capitalism has experienced renewed popularity. Flush with victory, the United States has embraced a particularly narrow and single-minded definition of capitalism and aggressively exported it worldwide. The defining trait of this brand of capitalism is an unwavering reverence for the icons of the market. Although promoted as a laissez-faire form of capitalism, it actually reflects the very evils of selfishness and greed by entrepreneurs that concerned Adam Smith.
Capitalism, however, can thrive without an extreme emphasis on efficiency and personal autonomy. Americans often forget that theirs is a rather peculiar form of capitalism, that other Western nations successfully maintain capitalistic systems that are fundamentally more balanced and nuanced in their effect on society. The unnecessarily inhumane aspects of American capitalism become apparent when compared to Canadian and Western European societies, with their more generous policies regarding affirmative action, accommodation for disabled persons, and family and medical leave for pregnant woman and their partners.
In American Law in the Age of Hypercapitalism, Ruth Colker examines how American law purports to reflect--and actively promotes--a laissez-faire capitalism that disproportionately benefits the entrepreneurial class. Colker proposes that the quality of American life depends also on fairness and equality rather than simply the single-minded and formulaic pursuit of efficiency and utility.

American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader gathers together leading scholars of American literature to address the questions of methodology that have invigorated and divided their field: the rise of interdisciplinarity and the wealth of theoretical methods now available to the critic of American literature. Their engagement with these issues takes a unique form in this book: Each scholar has chosen a methodologically innovative essay, which he or she then introduces, explaining why it is both exemplary in its approach and central to the issues that most engage American literary scholarship today. The book includes both an introduction to the controversial interdisciplinary methods that have made American literary studies such a vibrant field, as well as groundbreaking scholarship on topics as diverse as James Fenimore Cooper, minstrel songs, and Lakota Indian stories.
This volume has been designed to serve as a starting point for teachers and students to explore the fundamental questions of American literary scholarship: What does "method" mean in literary studies? Which texts should it study? What makes literary study unique? What should literary scholarship do? American Literary Studies argues that these questions can only be answered through a discussion of the interdisciplinary methods currently in use by scholars today. Finally, an original introduction by Michael A. Elliott and Claudia Stokes explains why questions of method are crucial to American literary studies and how past scholars of American literature have tried to answer them.
Contributors include: Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Wai Chee Dimock, Ann duCille, Michael A. Elliott, Frances Smith Foster, Elaine A. Jahner, Rob Kroes, Arnold Krupat, Paul Lauter, Marilee Lindemann, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Christopher J. Looby, David Palumbo-Liu, Roy Harvey Pearce, Lora Romero, Ramón Saldívar, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Werner Sollors, Claudia Stokes, Claudia Tate, Paula A. Treichler, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Laura Wexler, Sau-ling C. Wong

An overview of the mysterious history of the Freemasons and their presence in American society

With over four million members worldwide, and two million in the U.S., Freemasonry is the largest fraternal organization in the world. Published in conjunction with the National Heritage Museum, this extravagantly illustrated volume offers an overview of Freemasonry’s origins in seventeenth-century Scotland and England before exploring its evolving role in American history, from the Revolution through the labor and civil rights movements, and into the twenty-first century. American Freemasons explores some of the causes for the rise and fall of membership in the fraternity and why it has attracted men in such large numbers for centuries.

American Freemasons is the perfect introduction to understanding a society that, while shrouded in mystery, has played an integral role in the lives and communities of millions of Americans.

Copublished with the National Heritage Museum.

From his founding of The Journal of Social History to his groundbreaking work on the history of emotions, weight, and parenting, Peter N. Stearns has pushed the boundaries of social history to new levels, presenting new insights into how people have lived and thought through the ages. Having established the history of emotions as a major subfield of social history, Stearns and his collaborators are poised to do the same thing with the study of human behavior. This is their manifesto.
American Behavioral History deals with specific uses of historical data and analysis to illuminate American behavior patterns, ranging from car buying rituals to sexuality, and from funeral practices to contemporary grandparenting. The anthology illustrates the advantages and parameters of analyzing the ways in which people behave, and adds significantly to our social understanding while developing innovative methods for historical teaching and research.
At its core, the collection demonstrates how the study of the past can be directly used to understand current behaviors in the United States. Throughout, contributors discuss not only specific behavioral patterns but, importantly, how to consider and interpret them as vital historical sources.
Contributors include Gary Cross, Paula Fass, Linda Rosenzweig, Susan Matt, Steven M. Gelber, Peter N. Stearns, Suzanne Smith, Mark M. Smith, Kevin White.

In 1933 Americans did something they had never done before: they voted to repeal an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Eighteenth Amendment, which for 13 years had prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, was nullified by the passage of another amendment, the Twenty-First. Many factors helped create this remarkable turn of events. One factor that was essential, Kenneth D. Rose here argues, was the presence of a large number of well-organized women promoting repeal.
Even more remarkable than the appearance of these women on the political scene was the approach they took to the politics of repeal. Intriguingly, the arguments employed by repeal women and by prohibition women were often mirror images of each other, even though the women on the two sides of the issue pursued diametrically opposed political agendas. Rose contends that a distinguishing feature of the women's repeal movement was an argument for home protection, a social feminist ideology that women repealists shared with the prohibitionist women of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The book surveys the women's movement to repeal national prohibition and places it within the contexts of women's temperance activity, women's political activity during the 1920s, and the campaign for repeal.
While recent years have seen much-needed attention devoted to the recovery of women's history, conservative women have too often been overlooked, deliberately ignored, or written off as unworthy of scrutiny. With American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition, Kenneth Rose fleshes out a crucial chapter in the history of American women and culture.

The Indian American community is one of the fastest growing immigrant communities in the U.S. Unlike previous generations, they are marked by a high degree of training as medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and university professors.
American Karma draws on participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how these highly skilled professionals have been inserted into the racial dynamics of American society and transformed into “people of color.” Focusing on first-generation, middle-class Indians in American suburbia, it also sheds light on how these transnational immigrants themselves come to understand and negotiate their identities.
Bhatia forcefully contends that to fully understand migrant identity and cultural formation it is essential that psychologists and others think of selfhood as firmly intertwined with sociocultural factors such as colonialism, gender, language, immigration, and race-based immigration laws.
American Karma offers a new framework for thinking about the construction of selfhood and identity in the context of immigration. This innovative approach advances the field of psychology by incorporating critical issues related to the concept of culture, including race, power, and conflict, and will also provide key insights to those in anthropology, sociology, human development, and migrant studies.

Cool. The concept has distinctly American qualities and it permeates almost every aspect of contemporary American culture. From Kool cigarettes and the Peanuts cartoon's Joe Cool to West Side Story (Keep cool, boy.) and urban slang (Be cool. Chill out.), the idea of cool, in its many manifestations, has seized a central place in our vocabulary. Where did this preoccupation with cool come from? How was Victorian culture, seemingly so ensconced, replaced with the current emotional status quo? From whence came American Cool?

These are the questions Peter Stearns seeks to answer in this timely and engaging volume. American Cool focuses extensively on the transition decades, from the erosion of Victorianism in the 1920s to the solidification of a cool culture in the 1960s. Beyond describing the characteristics of the new directions and how they altered or amended earlier standards, the book seeks to explain why the change occurred. It then assesses some of the outcomes and longer-range consequences of this transformation.

The origins of the U.S. Constitution are the source of endless debate. What did the founders intend when they drafted this monumental work? How should we interpret their formulations in the contemporary world? Is the Constitution a living, breathing document, as is so frequently said, or is it more staid in its intentions?
Comparing the writings and speeches of the founders with the authors they read, studied, and imitated, M. N. S. Sellers here identifies the central tenets of American Republicanism. What, he asks, did "republicanism" mean to the Americans who drafted and ratified the Constitution? Drawing on an impressive array of historical sources, this interdisciplinary work convincingly demonstrates that the Constitution was far less influenced by English or continental political thought than has been previously thought. Rather, Sellers argues, the Constitution is firmly rooted in classical Roman concepts of law and philosophy.
American Republicanism presents the primary republican narratives in their American context, providing contemporary lawyers, philosophers, and historians with a window into the attitudes and understandings that animated the Constitution. The ratification debates confirm how little in the new American conception of republicanism was still at issue in 1787 and how much Americans owed to Rome's example and the Latin authors who dominated their colonial grammar-school cirriculum.

An overview of the mysterious history of the Freemasons and their presence in American society

With over four million members worldwide, and two million in the U.S., Freemasonry is the largest fraternal organization in the world. Published in conjunction with the National Heritage Museum, this extravagantly illustrated volume offers an overview of Freemasonry’s origins in seventeenth-century Scotland and England before exploring its evolving role in American history, from the Revolution through the labor and civil rights movements, and into the twenty-first century. American Freemasons explores some of the causes for the rise and fall of membership in the fraternity and why it has attracted men in such large numbers for centuries.

American Freemasons is the perfect introduction to understanding a society that, while shrouded in mystery, has played an integral role in the lives and communities of millions of Americans.

Copublished with the National Heritage Museum.

Most human bodies have two arms, two legs, hands, feet, a head. Yet the body, as we perceive it, is ultimately a cultural construct defined by the values and meanings each individual, and each culture, ascribes to it. Beyond its corporeal realities, the implications of the body-how we adorn, alter, heal, and please it-are potentially endless, limited only by the manner in which we frame it.
Revealing how the human body has served as as metaphor for social process, the anthology unveils the body as intrinsically configured by politics, gender, racial categories, fears of pollution, and commercial forces which exploit and regulate it. Historical snapshots of American bodies over the past two and a half centuries, the essays in this volume cover such diverse subjects as sailor tattoos, maritime cannibalism in the early 1800's, birth control, rest cures for neurasthenia, and, more recently, anorexia, boxing, cyberpunk, and plastic surgery. Drawing from history, literary and cultural studies, and film studies, American bodies is an eclectic, stimulating collection that will challenge many fundamental beliefs about our physical form.

American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader gathers together leading scholars of American literature to address the questions of methodology that have invigorated and divided their field: the rise of interdisciplinarity and the wealth of theoretical methods now available to the critic of American literature. Their engagement with these issues takes a unique form in this book: Each scholar has chosen a methodologically innovative essay, which he or she then introduces, explaining why it is both exemplary in its approach and central to the issues that most engage American literary scholarship today. The book includes both an introduction to the controversial interdisciplinary methods that have made American literary studies such a vibrant field, as well as groundbreaking scholarship on topics as diverse as James Fenimore Cooper, minstrel songs, and Lakota Indian stories.
This volume has been designed to serve as a starting point for teachers and students to explore the fundamental questions of American literary scholarship: What does "method" mean in literary studies? Which texts should it study? What makes literary study unique? What should literary scholarship do? American Literary Studies argues that these questions can only be answered through a discussion of the interdisciplinary methods currently in use by scholars today. Finally, an original introduction by Michael A. Elliott and Claudia Stokes explains why questions of method are crucial to American literary studies and how past scholars of American literature have tried to answer them.
Contributors include: Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Wai Chee Dimock, Ann duCille, Michael A. Elliott, Frances Smith Foster, Elaine A. Jahner, Rob Kroes, Arnold Krupat, Paul Lauter, Marilee Lindemann, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Christopher J. Looby, David Palumbo-Liu, Roy Harvey Pearce, Lora Romero, Ramón Saldívar, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Werner Sollors, Claudia Stokes, Claudia Tate, Paula A. Treichler, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Laura Wexler, Sau-ling C. Wong

Winner of the 2010 Book Award from the New England Historical Association
American constitutionalism represents this country’s greatest gift to human freedom, yet its story remains largely untold. For over two hundred years, its ideals, ideas, and institutions influenced different peoples in different lands at different times. American constitutionalism and the revolutionary republican documents on which it is based affected countless countries by helping them develop their own constitutional democracies. Western constitutionalism—of which America was a part along with Britain and France—reached a major turning point in global history in 1989, when the forces of democracy exceeded the forces of autocracy for the first time.
Historian George Athan Billias traces the spread of American constitutionalism—from Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean region, to Asia and Africa—beginning chronologically with the American Revolution and the fateful "shot heard round the world" and ending with the conclusion of the Cold War in 1989. The American model contributed significantly by spearheading the drive to greater democracy throughout the Western world, and Billias’s landmark study tells a story that will change the way readers view the important role American constitutionalism played during this era.

Long after the dead have been buried, and lives and property rebuilt, the social and cultural impact of disasters lingers. Examining immediate and long term responses to such disasters as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the Challenger explosion, American Disasters explores what natural and man made catastrophes reveal about the societies in which they occur.
Ranging widely, essayists here examine the 1900 storm that ravaged Galveston, Texas, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Titanic sinking, the Northridge earthquake, the crash of Air Florida Flight 90, the 1977 Chicago El train crash, and many other devastating events. These catastrophes elicited vastly different responses, and thus raise a number of important questions. How, for example did African Americans, feminists, and labor activists respond to the Titanic disaster? Why did the El train crash take on such symbolic meaning for the citizens of Chicago? In what ways did the San Francisco earthquake reaffirm rather than challenge a predominant faith in progress?
Taken together, these essays explain how and why disasters are transformative, how people make sense of them, how they function as social dramas during which communities and the nation think aloud about themselves and their direction.
Contributors include Carl Smith, Duane A. Gill, Ann Larabee, J. Steven Picou, and Ted Steinberg.

Winner of the American Society of Criminology 2015 Michael J. Hindelang Book Award for the Most Outstanding Contribution to Research in Criminology





Since the mid-1990s, the fast-growing suburb of Amherst, NY has been voted by numerous publications as one of the safest places to live in America. Yet, like many of America’s seemingly idyllic suburbs, Amherst is by no means without crime—especially when it comes to adolescents. In America’s Safest City, noted juvenile justice scholar Simon I. Singer uses the types of delinquency seen in Amherst as a case study illuminating the roots of juvenile offending and deviance in modern society. If we are to understand delinquency, Singer argues, we must understand it not just in impoverished areas, but in affluent ones as well.

Drawing on ethnographic work, interviews with troubled youth, parents and service providers, and extensive surveys of teenage residents in Amherst, the book illustrates how a suburban environment is able to provide its youth with opportunities to avoid frequent delinquencies. Singer compares the most delinquent teens he surveys with the least delinquent, analyzing the circumstances that did or did not lead them to deviance and the ways in which they confront their personal difficulties, societal discontents, and serious troubles. Adolescents, parents, teachers, coaches and officials, he concludes, are able in this suburban setting to recognize teens’ need for ongoing sources of trust, empathy, and identity in a multitude of social settings, allowing them to become what Singer terms ‘relationally modern’ individuals better equipped to deal with the trials and tribulations of modern life. A unique and comprehensive study, America’s Safest City is a major new addition to scholarship on juveniles and crime in America.


Crime, Law and Social Change's special issue on America's Safest City

The Indian American community is one of the fastest growing immigrant communities in the U.S. Unlike previous generations, they are marked by a high degree of training as medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and university professors.
American Karma draws on participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how these highly skilled professionals have been inserted into the racial dynamics of American society and transformed into “people of color.” Focusing on first-generation, middle-class Indians in American suburbia, it also sheds light on how these transnational immigrants themselves come to understand and negotiate their identities.
Bhatia forcefully contends that to fully understand migrant identity and cultural formation it is essential that psychologists and others think of selfhood as firmly intertwined with sociocultural factors such as colonialism, gender, language, immigration, and race-based immigration laws.
American Karma offers a new framework for thinking about the construction of selfhood and identity in the context of immigration. This innovative approach advances the field of psychology by incorporating critical issues related to the concept of culture, including race, power, and conflict, and will also provide key insights to those in anthropology, sociology, human development, and migrant studies.

From his founding of The Journal of Social History to his groundbreaking work on the history of emotions, weight, and parenting, Peter N. Stearns has pushed the boundaries of social history to new levels, presenting new insights into how people have lived and thought through the ages. Having established the history of emotions as a major subfield of social history, Stearns and his collaborators are poised to do the same thing with the study of human behavior. This is their manifesto.
American Behavioral History deals with specific uses of historical data and analysis to illuminate American behavior patterns, ranging from car buying rituals to sexuality, and from funeral practices to contemporary grandparenting. The anthology illustrates the advantages and parameters of analyzing the ways in which people behave, and adds significantly to our social understanding while developing innovative methods for historical teaching and research.
At its core, the collection demonstrates how the study of the past can be directly used to understand current behaviors in the United States. Throughout, contributors discuss not only specific behavioral patterns but, importantly, how to consider and interpret them as vital historical sources.
Contributors include Gary Cross, Paula Fass, Linda Rosenzweig, Susan Matt, Steven M. Gelber, Peter N. Stearns, Suzanne Smith, Mark M. Smith, Kevin White.

Most human bodies have two arms, two legs, hands, feet, a head. Yet the body, as we perceive it, is ultimately a cultural construct defined by the values and meanings each individual, and each culture, ascribes to it. Beyond its corporeal realities, the implications of the body-how we adorn, alter, heal, and please it-are potentially endless, limited only by the manner in which we frame it.
Revealing how the human body has served as as metaphor for social process, the anthology unveils the body as intrinsically configured by politics, gender, racial categories, fears of pollution, and commercial forces which exploit and regulate it. Historical snapshots of American bodies over the past two and a half centuries, the essays in this volume cover such diverse subjects as sailor tattoos, maritime cannibalism in the early 1800's, birth control, rest cures for neurasthenia, and, more recently, anorexia, boxing, cyberpunk, and plastic surgery. Drawing from history, literary and cultural studies, and film studies, American bodies is an eclectic, stimulating collection that will challenge many fundamental beliefs about our physical form.

Detailing the events of the Progressive Era and World War I (1901-20), America in the Age of the Titans is the only interdisciplinary history covering this period currently available. The book contains the results of research into primary sources an drecent scholarship with an emphases on leading personalities and anecdotes about them. Sean Dennis Cashman's sequesl to America in the Gilded Age gives special attention to industry and inventions, and social and cultural history. He covers developments in science, technology, and industry; the Progressive movement and the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, immigration, the new woman, and labor, including the Industrial Workers of the World and the Great Red Scare; the transportation and communications revolution in radio and motion pictures; the cultural contribuation of artists, architects, and creatice writers; and America's foreign policies across the world. Written in a lively, accessible style with over sixty illustrations, this book is an excellent introduction to these momentous years. It provides an assessment of the contributions of the titans - political, scientific, and industrial.

Every American knows that Thomas Alva Edison's most famous invention was the light bulb, but who invented the pregnancy test? How was the airbag invented? How was the first computer patented? Stephen van Dulken examines the way inventions and patents such as these have helped to create the "American Dream."
Between 1911 and 1999, the number of registered U.S. patents rose from 1 million to 6 million. Showcasing dozens of those original patent drawings from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, American Inventions shows how trends in the history of the United States are reflected in the patent records. For example, the invention of the Frisbee dates back to 1920 when a Yale University student recalled throwing around the pie tins of the nearby Frisbie Baking Company, but it was not until 1948 that Fred Morrison and Warren Francioni capitalized on Americans' new-found fascination with flying saucers by applying for a patent on a plastic flying disk.
Van Dulken surveys the inventions and patents of the workplace, the home, the kitchen, the open road, and the beauty parlor, to name a few, to find the compelling stories and eureka moments in American history. From bobby pins to in-line skates, from the jukebox to the fax machine, American Inventions is a captivating catalog of the famous and not-so-famous contraptions that have shaped the American way of life.

“Come to me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”Mathew 11:28 (AKJV)
In the early 1990s, a grassroots coalition of churches in Baltimore, Maryland helped launch what would become a national movement. Joining forces with labor and low-wage worker organizations, they passed the first municipal living wage ordinance. Since then, over 144 municipalities and counties as well as numerous universities and local businesses in the United States have enacted such ordinances.
Although religious persons and organizations have been important both in the origins of the living wage movement and in its continuing success, they are often ignored or under analyzed. Drawing on participant observation in multiple cities, All You That Labor analyzes and evaluates the contributions of religious activists to the movement. The book explores the ways religious organizations do this work in concert with low-wage workers, the challenges religious activists face, and how people of faith might better nurture moral agency in relation to the political economy. Ultimately, C. Melissa Snarr provides clarity on how to continue to cultivate, renew, and expand religious resources dedicated to the moral agency of low-wage workers and their allies.