Author: Stephen M. Kosslyn
Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world's students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century -- how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized.The Minerva curriculum focuses on practical knowledge (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.
Author: Catie Snow Bailard
The beauty of democracy is not only that citizens can vote a candidate into office but that they can also vote one out. As digital media grows omnipresent, it becomes more important for political scientists and communication scholars to understand its influence on all aspects of the political process, from campaigning to governance. Catie Snow Bailard argues that the Internetby altering the quantity and range of information available to citizensdirectly influences the ability of individuals to evaluate government performance. It also affects public satisfaction with the quality of available democratic practices and helps motivate political activity and organization. Bailard originates two theories for democratization specialists to considermirror-holding and window-openingwhich she tests using data collected from dozens of countries and two randomized field experiments. Mirror-holding explores how accessing the Internet allows citizens to see a more detailed and nuanced view of their own governments performance. Window-opening, however, enables those same citizens to glimpse how other governments perform, particularly in comparison to their own. Although the book offers a robust empirical foundation for testing the Internets effects on democratic attitudes, Bailard ultimately concludes that access to information does not necessarily ensure that democracy will automatically flourish.
Author: John M. Coggeshall
In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Owens family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state. Through hours of interviews with Mable and her relatives, as well as friends and neighbors, Coggeshall presents an ethnographic history that allows members of a largely ignored community to speak and record their own history for the first time. This story sheds new light on the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall documents the community's 150-year history of resistance to white oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.
Author: Iain Campbell
Ideal for the nature-loving traveler, Wildlife of Australia is a handy photographic pocket guide to the most widely seen birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and habitats of Australia. The guide features more than 400 stunning color photographs, and coverage includes 350 birds, 70 mammals, 30 reptiles, and 16 frogs likely to be encountered in Australia's major tourist destinations. Accessible species accounts are useful for both general travelers and serious naturalists, and the invaluable habitat section describes the Australian bush and its specific wildlife. Animal species with similar features are placed on the same plates in order to aid identification. Wildlife of Australia is an indispensable and thorough resource for any nature enthusiast interested in this remarkable continent. Easy-to-use pocket guide More than 400 high-quality photographs Accessible text aids identification Habitat guide describes the Australian bush and its specific wildlife Coverage includes the 350 birds, 70 mammals, 30 reptiles, and 16 frogs most likely to be seen on a trip around Australia
Author: Susan E. Bell
From the 1940s to the 1970s, millions of women were exposed prenatally to the synthetic estrogen DES, a wonder drug intended to prevent miscarriages. However, DES actually had damaging consequences for the women born from DES mothers. The DES daughters as they are known, were found to have a rare form of vaginal cancer or were infertile. They were also at risk for miscarriages, stillbirths, and ectopic pregnancies.In DES Daughters, Susan Bell recounts the experiences of this generation of victims. In moving, heartfelt narratives, she presents the voices of those women who developed cancer, those who were cancer-free but have concerns about becoming pregnant, and those who suffered other medical and/or reproductive difficulties.Bell examines the hierarchy of knowledge and power of scientists, doctors, and daughters, tracing the emergence of a feminist health movement. The embodied knowledge of these DES daughters prompted them to become advocates and form a social movement that challenged reproductive medical knowledge specifically, but also the politics of womens health in general. Bells important book chronicles the history and future of these grassroots activists born out of illness, suffering, and uncertainty.
Author: Edited by Jeffrey A. Sluka
There is real personal danger for anthropologists who dare to speak and write against terror; by doing so, they potentially and sometimes actually bring the terror down on themselves.Jeffrey A. Sluka, from the IntroductionDeath Squad is the first work to focus specifically on the anthropology of state terror. It brings together an international group of anthropologists who have done extensive research in areas marked by extreme forms of state violence and who have studied state terror from the perspective of victims and survivors. The book presents eight case studies from seven countriesSpain, India (Punjab and Kashmir), Argentina, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Indonesia, and the Philippinesto demonstrate the cultural complexities and ambiguities of terror when viewed at the local level and from the participants' point of view. Contributors deal with such topics as the role of Loyalist death squads in the culture of terror in Northern Ireland, the three-tier mechanism of state terror in Indonesia, the complex role of religion in violence by both the state and insurgents in Punjab and Kashmir, and the ways in which disappearances are used to destabilize and demoralize opponents of the state in Argentina, Guatemala, and India.
Author: Nicola Suthor
Roughness is the sensual quality most often associated with Rembrandt's idiosyncratic style. It best defines the specific structure of his painterly textures, which subtly capture and engage the imagination of the beholder. Rembrandt's Roughness examines how the artist's unconventional technique pushed the possibilities of painting into startling and unexpected realms.Drawing on the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl as well as firsthand accounts by Rembrandt's contemporaries, Nicola Suthor provides invaluable new perspectives on many of the painter's best-known masterpieces, including The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman, The Return of the Prodigal Son, and Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. She focuses on pictorial phenomena such as the thickness of the paint material, the visibility of the colored priming, and the dramatizing element of chiaroscuro, showing how they constitute Rembrandt's most effective tools for extending the representational limits of painting. Suthor explores how Rembrandt developed a visually precise handling of his artistic medium that forced his viewers to confront the paint itself as a source of meaning, its challenging complexity expressed in the subtlest stroke of his brush.A beautifully illustrated meditation on a painter like no other, Rembrandt's Roughness reflects deeply on the intellectual challenge that Rembrandt's unrivaled artistry posed to the art theory of his time and its eminent role in the history of art today.
Author: Eric Williams
Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.