Author: Maurice Mandelbaum Philosopher Maurice Mandelbaum offers a broad-ranging essay on the roles of chance, choice, purpose, and necessity in human events. He traces the many changes these concepts have undergone, from the analyses of Hobbes and Spinoza, through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Mandelbaum examines two contrary tendencies in the history of social theories. Some thinkers, he shows, have explained the character of institutions in terms of their individual purposes, whereas others have stressed relationships of necessity among society's institutions. Mandelbaum discusses chance, choice, and necessity at length and reaches some provocative conclusions about the ways in which they are interwoven in human affairs.
Author: Erik M. Bachman
This comparative historical study explores the broad sociocultural factors at play in the relationships among U.S. obscenity laws and literary modernism and naturalism in the early twentieth century. Putting obscenity case laws crisis of legitimation and modernisms crisis of representation into dialogue, Erik Bachman shows how obscenity trials and other attempts to suppress allegedly vulgar writing in the United States affected a wide-ranging debate about the power of the printed word to incite emotion and shape behavior.Far from seeking simply to transgress cultural norms or sexual boundaries, Bachman argues, proscribed authors such as Wyndham Lewis, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, and James T. Farrell refigured the capacity of writing to evoke the obscene so that readers might become aware of the social processes by which they were being turned into mass consumers, voyeurs, and racialized subjects. Through such efforts, these writers participated in debates about the libidinal efficacy of language with a range of contemporaries, from behavioral psychologists and advertising executives to book cover illustrators, magazine publishers, civil rights activists, and judges.Focusing on case law and the social circumstances informing it, Literary Obscenities provides an alternative conceptual framework for understanding obscenitys subjugation of human bodies, desires, and identities to abstract social forces. It will appeal especially to scholars of American literature, American studies, and U.S. legal history.
Author: Sauers, Richard A.
Most students of the American Civil War know the name George Gordon Meade, but few can tell you about the man. With this addition to Potomacs Military Profiles series, historian Richard Sauers examines the life of one of the Union Armys most notable generals. Rising from the Union officer corps to lead the previously ill-fated Army of the Potomac, Meade took command only hours before his forces stumbled upon Robert E. Lees Confederates at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863. He led his men to victory in one of the most famous battles in history, but Meade was soon embroiled in political battles with fellow generals and Washington politicians. Despite detractors efforts to question Meades judgment and smear his reputationuefforts often exacerbated by the generals own volatile temper and undiplomatic behavioruhe continued to put duty to his country and his men first. When Ulysses S. Grant was named lieutenant general in charge of all Union forces, Grant made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac and soon overshadowed Meade. Sauers chronicles the tense relationship that developed between the two men and the effect it had on the crucial last days of the war. Sauerss concise but authoritative biography sheds new light on one of the Civil Wars most significant leaders. His book, the only new biography of Meade to appear in over thirty years, should spark renewed study of this brave but overlooked general.
Author: Michael Lind
Ancient Zapotec Religion is the first comprehensive study of Zapotec religion as it existed in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on the eve of the Spanish Conquest. Author Michael Lind brings a new perspective, focusing not on underlying theological principles but on the material and spatial expressions of religious practice.Using sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish colonial documents and archaeological findings related to the time period leading up to the Spanish Conquest, he presents new information on deities, ancestor worship and sacred bundles, the Zapotec cosmos, the priesthood, religious ceremonies and rituals, the nature of temples, the distinctive features of the sacred and solar calendars, and the religious significance of the murals of Mitlathe most sacred and holy center. He also shows how Zapotec religion served to integrate Zapotec city-state structure throughout the valley of Oaxaca, neighboring mountain regions, and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.Ancient Zapotec Religion is the first in-depth and interdisciplinary book on the Zapotecs and their religious practices and will be of great interest to archaeologists, epigraphers, historians, and specialists in Native American, Latin American, and religious studies.
Author: Francisco J. Varela
The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience. The authors argue that only by having a sense of common ground between mind in Science and mind in experience can our understanding of cognition be more complete. Toward that end, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate it in relation to other traditions such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis.
Author: Acree, Cynthia B.
A Marine squadron commander prepares his men for combat and on the second day of the Gulf War, is shot down by a Surface to Air Missile and captured by the Iraqis. As a pilot, senior Marine and squadron Commanding Officer, Acree is a goldmine of the tactical information that the iraqis so desperately needed. Though he is brutally beaten and tortured during his 48 days of captivity, Colonel Acree refuses to comply with Iraqi demands.Woven with the account is the story of his new wife, finally married to her high school sweetheart and, as the wife of a commanding officer, finds herself responsible for supporting hundreds of Marine family members as her husband prepares his men for war. When her husband is captured, she finds herself in the eye of an international media storm and experiences her own form of captivity. She launches a massive letter writing campaign to pressure the Iraqi government and founds an international organization for Gulf War POWs and MIAs.Finally, after seven months apart, husband and wife are reunited and attempt the difficult road back to normal life.
Author: Suzette Bishop
Suzette Marie Bishop teaches writing at Texas A&M International University. This will be her first full-length book, though she's published a chapbook and many individual poems in national poetry journals. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, Ms. Bishop's credits include publications in Antioch Review, 13th Moon, Eratica, Aries, The Little Magazine, and many other literary journals. As a poet and writing teacher on the faculty of Texas A&M International, she gives many readings, as well as workshops for gifted children, seniors, and other writers on the US-Mexico border; she has worked with at-risk youth and with the rural Hispanic community.
Author: Hans-Joerg Tiede foreword by Michael Bérubé
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was founded to advance the professionalization of Americas faculty. University Reform examines the social and intellectual circumstances that led to the organizations initial development, as well as its work to defend academic freedom. It explores the AAUPs subsequent response to World War I and the first Red Scare. It also describes the founders efforts, especially those of Arthur O. Lovejoy and James McKeen Cattell, in securing a greater role for faculty in the government of colleges and universities.
Author: Inge Crosman Wimmers
What happens when we read novels and how do we make sense of them? Inge Wimmers explores these questions by developing a flexible poetics of reading that generously opens up the interpretive space between reader and text, while drawing on current theories of reading and combining rhetorical, pragmatic, and phenomenological approaches. Poetics, here, is extended beyond the study of purely textual features to structures of exchange between text and reader. In a discussion of four major French novels from the seventeenth century to the present, the author not only sets up a broad-based poetics but also makes important contributions to contemporary issues in the study of narrative. Wimmers introduces the concept of multiple, interlocking frames of reference that allows for the integration of diverse critical perspectives. Analyzing La Princesse de Cleves, Madame Bovary, A la recherche du temps perdu, and Projet pour une revolution a New York, she shows how texts provide some frames of reference, while others are produced by the reader's disposition and cultural milieu.Originally published in 1989.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Brian Frehner
Oil has made fortunes, caused wars, and shaped nations. Accordingly, no one questions the idea that the quest for oil is a quest for power. The question we should ask, Finding Oil suggests, is what kind of power prospectors have wanted. This book revises oils early history by exploring the incredibly varied stories of the men who pitted themselves against nature to unleash the power of oil.Brian Frehner shows how, despite the towering presence of a figure like John D. Rockefeller as a quintessential oil man, prospectors were a diverse lot who saw themselves, their interests, and their relationships with nature in profoundly different ways. He traces their various pursuits of power from 1859 to 1920 as a struggle for cultural, intellectual, and professional authority, over both nature and their peers. Here we see how some saw power as the work they did exploring and drilling into landscapes, while others saw it in the intellectual work of explaining how and where oil accumulated. Charting the intersection of human and natural history, their story traces the ever-evolving relationship between science and industry and reveals the unsuspected role geology played in shaping our understanding of the history of oil.