Author: Olsen, John Andreas What influences have shaped air power since human flight became a reality more than a hundred years ago? Global Air Power provides insight into the evolution of air power theory and practice by examining the experience of six of the worlds largest air forcesthose of the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Russia, India, and Chinaand of representative smaller air forces in Pacific Asia, Latin America, and continental Europe. The chapters, written by highly regarded scholars and military leaders, explore how various nations have integrated air power into their armed forces and how they have applied air power in both regular and irregular warfare and in peacetime operations. They cover the organizational, professional, and doctrinal issues that air forces confronted in the past, the lessons learned from victory and defeat, and emerging challenges and opportunities.Further, Global Air Power supplements the traditional military perspective with examinations of the ideological, economic, and cultural factors that give air forces their distinctive characters. Chapters show how the interplay among these internal factors, together with external challenges, determines the structure, role, and effectiveness of air forces. Together, these chapters illuminate universal trends as well as similarities and differences among the worlds air forces. Its combination of military history and sociopolitical analysis makes Global Air Power especially valuable to a broad range of historians, air power specialists, and general readers interested in national defense and international relations.

Author: F. John Odling-Smee The seemingly innocent observation that the activities of organisms bring about changes in environments is so obvious that it seems an unlikely focus for a new line of thinking about evolution. Yet niche construction--as this process of organism-driven environmental modification is known--has hidden complexities. By transforming biotic and abiotic sources of natural selection in external environments, niche construction generates feedback in evolution on a scale hitherto underestimated--and in a manner that transforms the evolutionary dynamic. It also plays a critical role in ecology, supporting ecosystem engineering and influencing the flow of energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Despite this, niche construction has been given short shrift in theoretical biology, in part because it cannot be fully understood within the framework of standard evolutionary theory. Wedding evolution and ecology, this book extends evolutionary theory by formally including niche construction and ecological inheritance as additional evolutionary processes. The authors support their historic move with empirical data, theoretical population genetics, and conceptual models. They also describe new research methods capable of testing the theory. They demonstrate how their theory can resolve long-standing problems in ecology, particularly by advancing the sorely needed synthesis of ecology and evolution, and how it offers an evolutionary basis for the human sciences. Already hailed as a pioneering work by some of the world's most influential biologists, this is a rare, potentially field-changing contribution to the biological sciences.

Author: Arthur H. Thornhill Noh drama has long fascinated Westerners by its poetic excellence and its dramatic power. To the student of medieval Japanese culture, however, noh writings, especially dramaturgical treatises, are also of immense value as monuments of culture. To uncover the larger patterns of cultural discourse in these theoretical works, Arthur Thornhill presents the first major study in English of the dramaturgical treatises of Komparu Zenchiku (1405-1468?), son-in-law and pupil of the illustrious Zeami and a pivotal figure in the history of Japanese noh drama. The book begins with annotated translations of two of Zenchiku's most important treatises, which delineate a system of seven symbolic categories called six circles and one dewdrop. Especially significant are two commentaries appended to the first treatise and composed by the Buddhist prelate Shigyoku (1383-1463) and Ichijo Kaneyoshi (1402-1481), the renowned court official and scholar of native literature and the Chinese classics. Together Zenchiku's symbolic system and the two commentaries reveal a microcosm of the intellectual and cultural dialogue among the dominant creeds of the Muromachi period--Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto.Originally published in .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 editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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: Jon D. Levenson Jews, Christians, and Muslims supposedly share a common religious heritage in the patriarch Abraham, and the idea that he should serve only as a source of unity among the three traditions has become widespread in both scholarly and popular circles. But in Inheriting Abraham, Jon Levenson reveals how the increasingly conventional notion of the three equally Abrahamic religions derives from a dangerous misunderstanding of key biblical and Quranic texts, fails to do full justice to any of the traditions, and is often biased against Judaism in subtle and pernicious ways.