Author: By Keena Lipsitz Tight political races with their emotionally charged debates, mud-slinging, and uncertain outcomes are stressful for voters and candidates alike, but that stress may be healthy for democracy. In Competitive Elections and the American Voter, Keena Lipsitz argues that highly contested electoral battles create an environment that allows citizens to make more enlightened decisions.The first book to use democratic theory to evaluate the quality of campaign rhetoric, Competitive Elections and the American Voter offers a rare overview of political contests at different levels of government. Lipsitz draws on a range of contemporary democratic theories, including egalitarian and deliberative conceptions, to develop campaign communication standards. To promote the values of political competition, equality, and deliberation Lipsitz contends that voters must have access to abundant, balanced information, representing a range of voices and involving a high level of dialogue between the candidates. Using advertising data, the book examines whether competitive House, Senate, and presidential campaigns operating at the state level generate such facts and arguments. It also tests the connection between this knowledge and greater voter understanding and engagement. Because close elections can push candidates to attack their opponents, the book investigates how negative advertising affects voters as well. Given the link between electoral competitiveness and an informed electorate, the book includes reform proposals that enhance competition.Competitive Elections and the American Voter reminds us that we avoid political controversy and conflict at our peril. This eye-opening analysis of political communication and campaign information environments encourages citizens, scholars, and campaign reformers to recognize the crucial role that well contested elections play in a democracy.
Author: Patrick T. McCormick
What if we began our study of Christian ethics not with an examination of our moral duties but with an exploration of the call of beauty? For like justice, beauty generates a call to a larger, more generous self. God's Beauty offers a fresh, positive approach to moral arguments calling us to work for social justice. It focuses on the calling of divine beauty summoning us to work for justice, protect human rights, overcome alienation and hostility, and be tenders and creators of beauty.
Author: Mary Whyte
More Than a Likeness: The Enduring Art of Mary Whyte is the first comprehensive book on the life and work of one of todays most renowned watercolorists. From Whytes earliest paintings in rural Ohio and Pennsylvania, to the riveting portraits of her southern neighbors, historian Martha R. Severens provides us with an intimate look into the artists private world. With more than two hundred full-color images of Whytes paintings and sketches, as well as comparison works by masters such as Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and John Singer Sargent, Severens clearly illustrates how Whytes art has been shaped and how the artist forged her own place in the world today. Though Whytes academic training in Philadelphia was in oil painting, she learned the art of watercolor on her ownby studying masterworks in museums. Today Whytes style of watercolor painting is a unique blend of classical realism and contemporary vision, as seen in her intimate portraits of Southern blue-collar workers and elderly African American women in the South Carolina lowcountry. For me ideas are more plentiful than the hours to paint them, and I worry that I cannot get to all of my thoughts before they are forgotten or are pushed aside by more pressing concerns, explains Whyte. Some works take time to evolve. Like small seeds the paintings might not come to fruition until several years later, after there has been ample time for germination. Using broad sweeping washes as well as miniscule brushstrokes, Whyte directs the viewers attention to the areas in her paintings she deems most important. Murky passages of neutral colors often give way to areas of intense detail and color, giving the works a variety of edges and poetic focus. Several paintings included in the book are accompanied by enlarged areas of detail, showcasing Whytes technical mastery. More Than a Likeness is replete with engaging artwork and inspiring text that mark the mid-point in Whytes artistry. Of what she will paint in the future, the artist says, I have always believed that as artists we dont choose our vocation, style, or subject matter. Art chooses us.
Author: Richard E. Morlan
Description and analysis of artifacts, fauna and features in a small summer season occupation characteristic of the Vunta Kutchin.
Author: Donald Woodforde Clark
Material from small-scale excavations near the Inuit-Native interface relates to several periods of Inuit prehistory but shows also interior or non-Inuit influence.
Author: Mark R. Ellis
Celebrated accounts of lawless towns that relied on the extra-legal justice of armed citizens and hired gunmen are part of the enduring cultural legacy of the American West. This image of the frontier has been fueled for more than a century by historiansboth amateur and academicand by various popular images. In the twenty-first century, Great Plains communities continue to perpetuate this image with tourist attractions and events that pay homage to their lawless past. But these romanticized depictions of the violent frontier do not accurately portray the legal culture of most early Great Plains communities.Law and Order in Buffalo Bills Country is a case study of law and legal culture in Lincoln County, Nebraska, during the nineteenth century. Mark R. Ellis argues that nascent nineteenth-century Great Plains communities shared an understanding of the law that allowed for the immediate implementation of legal institutions such as courts, jails, and law enforcement. A common legal culture, imported from New England and the Midwest, influenced frontier communities to uphold traditions of law and order even in the wild and wooly frontier community of North Platte, Nebraska. This study is one of the first to examine legal institutions on the Great Plains. By setting aside the issue of a violent frontier West and focusing instead on community building and legal institutions, this study presents a very different image of the frontier-era Great Plains.
Author: Douglas A. Lorimer
By exploring the dimensions of race, race relations and resistance, this book offers a new account of the British Empires greatest failure and its most disturbing legacy. Using a wide range of published and archival sources, this study of racial discourse from 1870 to 1914 argues that race, then as now, was a contested territory within the metropolitan culture. Based on a wide range of published and archival sources, this book uncovers the conflicting opinions that characterised late Victorian and Edwardian discourse on the colour question. It offers a revisionist account of race in science, and provides original studies of the invention of the language of race relations and of resistance to race-thinking led by radical abolitionists and persons of Asian and African descent living in the United Kingdom. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of race, colonialism and culture, and to a readership interested in the history of science and race, anti-slavery and humanitarian movements, and the roots of anti-racist resistance.
Author: F. Scott Spencer
Arguably the biggest blockbuster love song ever composed, the Song of Songs holds a unique place in Jewish and Christian canons as the holiest book, in the minds of some readers, and the sexiest in its language and imagery. This commentary aims to interpret this vibrant Song in a contemporary feminist key, informed by close linguistic-literary and social-cultural analysis. Though finding much in the Song to celebrate for women (and men) in their embodied, passionate lives, this work also exposes tensions, vulnerabilities, and inequities between the sexes and among society at largejust what we would expect of a perceptive, poignant love ballad that still tops the charts.
Author: Jacob Grimm
When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their Childrens and Household Tales in 1812, followed by a second volume in 1815, they had no idea that such stories as Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella would become the most celebrated in the world. Yet few people today are familiar with the majority of tales from the two early volumes, since in the next four decades the Grimms would publish six other editions, each extensively revised in content and style. For the very first time, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm makes available in English all 156 stories from the 1812 and 1815 editions. These narrative gems, newly translated and brought together in one beautiful book, are accompanied by sumptuous new illustrations from award-winning artist Andrea Dezso. From The Frog King to The Golden Key, wondrous worlds unfoldheroes and heroines are rewarded, weaker animals triumph over the strong, and simple bumpkins prove themselves not so simple after all. Esteemed fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes offers accessible translations that retain the spare description and engaging storytelling style of the originals. Indeed, this is what makes the tales from the 1812 and 1815 editions uniquethey reflect diverse voices, rooted in oral traditions, that are absent from the Grimms later, more embellished collections of tales. Zipess introduction gives important historical context, and the book includes the Grimms prefaces and notes. A delight to read, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm presents these peerless stories to a whole new generation of readers.