Author: Ralph Lutts At the beginning of the twentieth century, the wild animal story emerged in Canadian literature as a distinct genre, in which animals pursue their own interestssurvival for themselves, their offspring, and perhaps a mate, or the pure pleasure of their wildness. Bringing together some of the most celebrated wild animal stories, Ralph H. Lutts places them firmly in the context of heated controversies about animal intelligence and purposeful behavior. Widely regarded as entertaining and educational, the early storiesby Charles G. D. Roberts, Ernest Thompson Seton, John Muir, Jack London and othershad an avid readership among adults and children. But some naturalists and at least one hunterTheodore Rooseveltdiscredited these writers as nature fakers, accusing them of falsely portraying animal behavior. The stories and commentaries collected here span the twentieth century. As present day animal behaviorists, psychologists, and the public attempt to sort out the meaning of what animals do and our obligations to them, Ralph Lutts maps some of the prominent features of our cultural landscape. Tales include: The Springfield Fox by Ernest Thompson Seton The Sounding of the Call by Jack London Stickeen by John Muir Journey to the Sea by Rachel Carson Other selections include esssays by Theoore Roosevelt, John Burroughs, Margaret Atwood, and Ralph H. Lutts. postamble();
Author: Frank Levy
Foreword by Nicholas Lemann A brilliant book that both clarifies and explains the seemingly contradictory trends of a booming economy, wage stagnation, and growing income inequality. Thomas B. Edsall, author, The New Politics of Inequality and political reporter at The Washington Post More than a decade ago, Frank Levy's classic Dollars and Dreams offered an incisive analysis of the dramatic changes then taking place in the American standard of living. As wage stagnation and rising income inequality in the 1970s and early 80s began to undermine Americans' traditional economic optimism, Levy's book provided the first diagnosis of what he called the quiet depression. Since then, the U.S. economy has made a dramatic comeback, but economic insecurity remains widespread. New technologies, increased immigration, and global competition have opened up a new economic playing field, one with new rules and new winners and losers. The New Dollars and Dreams explores this puzzling economic landscape, in which low unemployment goes hand in hand with sluggish wage growth and high income inequality. This completely revised and expanded version of Levy's original book offers an invaluable guide to the sweeping economic, social, and political changes that have remade life in the United States over the past twenty-five years.Levy tells a fascinating and insightful story about what happened to American incomes and jobs. His plot resists the simple truths of everyday journalism, and explains the economic and political twists and turns that have shaped the current American economyincluding the oil and food price inflations of the 1970s, the market deregulations and corporate downsizings of the 1980s, the emergence of women as sole breadwinners in many families, the migration of jobs to the suburbs, and the computerization of work. The New Dollars and Dreams illuminates the key sources of inequality, with chapters that examine the disparate employment progress of whites, minorities, men, and women, and it carefully investigates the claim that the concentration of very high incomes is the result of a winner-take-all economy. Although the growth of the service economy is often blamed for inequality, Levy locates a more fundamental cause in the rising educational and skill demands brought about by restructuring of work in all sectors of the economy. An important part of the story also involves the transformation of the American family from extended and two-parent households to those headed by single mothers and lone individuals. By making sense of these complex trends, The New Dollars and Dreams offers crucial insights into why, despite a thriving economy, many Americans no longer feel secure in their financial futures.A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
Author: By James J. Gigantino II
Contrary to popular perception, slavery persisted in the North well into the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in New Jersey, the last northern state to pass an abolition statute, in 1804. Because of the nature of the law, which freed children born to enslaved mothers only after they had served their mother's master for more than two decades, slavery continued in New Jersey through the Civil War. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 finally destroyed its last vestiges.The Ragged Road to Abolition chronicles the experiences of slaves and free blacks, as well as abolitionists and slaveholders, during slavery's slow northern death. Abolition in New Jersey during the American Revolution was a contested battle, in which constant economic devastation and fears of freed blacks overrunning the state government limited their ability to gain freedom. New Jersey's gradual abolition law kept at least a quarter of the state's black population in some degree of bondage until the 1830s. The sustained presence of slavery limited African American community formation and forced Jersey blacks to structure their households around multiple gradations of freedom while allowing New Jersey slaveholders to participate in the interstate slave trade until the 1850s. Slavery's persistence dulled white understanding of the meaning of black freedom and helped whites to associate black with slave, enabling the further marginalization of New Jersey's growing free black population.By demonstrating how deeply slavery influenced the political, economic, and social life of blacks and whites in New Jersey, this illuminating study shatters the perceived easy dichotomies between North and South or free states and slave states at the onset of the Civil War.
Author: THOMAS WOLFE
After completing military service, veterans can have a difficult time finding employment upon returning to civilian life. Out of Uniform is designed to help all transitioning military personnel, regardless of service, branch, rank, rating, time in service, time in grade, or specialty. Although all service members share many common denominators, each individual brings something unique to the job market. The parameters of the search may vary, but the target is the sameland the right job the first time. The information in this book will enhance the odds of hitting that target.This book is divided into eight sections, covering matters in roughly the same order that they occur in the military-to-civilian transition process. Another useful feature is the KeyWord Index, which allows the reader to locate specific information throughout the book, regardless of the part or chapter. In addition to all of the technical guidance, readers will also discover important information in the anecdotes based on actual experiences of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. Out of Uniform is an invaluable resource for veterans who want to make the most out of their civilian career opportunities.
Author: Max H. Bazerman
When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In Blind Spots, leading business ethicists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel examine the ways we overestimate our ability to do what is right and how we act unethically without meaning to. From the collapse of Enron and corruption in the tobacco industry, to sales of the defective Ford Pinto, the downfall of Bernard Madoff, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the authors investigate the nature of ethical failures in the business world and beyond, and illustrate how we can become more ethical, bridging the gap between who we are and who we want to be. Explaining why traditional approaches to ethics don't work, the book considers how blind spots like ethical fading--the removal of ethics from the decision--making process--have led to tragedies and scandals such as the Challenger space shuttle disaster, steroid use in Major League Baseball, the crash in the financial markets, and the energy crisis. The authors demonstrate how ethical standards shift, how we neglect to notice and act on the unethical behavior of others, and how compliance initiatives can actually promote unethical behavior. They argue that scandals will continue to emerge unless such approaches take into account the psychology of individuals faced with ethical dilemmas. Distinguishing our should self (the person who knows what is correct) from our want self (the person who ends up making decisions), the authors point out ethical sinkholes that create questionable actions. Suggesting innovative individual and group tactics for improving human judgment, Blind Spots shows us how to secure a place for ethics in our workplaces, institutions, and daily lives.
Author: By Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto
Medici Gardens: From Making to Design challenges the common assumption that such gardens as Trebbio, Cafaggiolo, Careggi, and Fiesole were the products of an established design practice whereby one client commissioned one architect or artist. The book reverses the usual belief that a garden is the practical application of theoretical principles extracted from garden treatises, and suggests that, in the case of the gardens in Florence, garden making preceded its theoretical articulation.Drawing from Medici tax returns, inventories, and correspondence, Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto examines the transformation of these gardens from functional and pleasurable kitchen gardens to symbols of political power and family prestige. The Medici gardens of the fifteenth century were the result both of everyday living and of a poetic activity that was influenced by cultural expectations and societal demands.Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the author compares the making of actual gardens to that of the literary pleasances described by Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ficino. Although the fictional gardens appear designed in that their place within literary works is carefully thought through, their actual counterparts are the product of a modus operandi, indebted to horticultural knowledge handed down from one generation to another in a slowly evolving tradition.
Author: Margaret Gibson
The 1950s and 1960s were years of shifting values and social changes that did not sit well with many citizens of Richmond, Virginia, and in particular with one conservative family, a staunchly southern mother and father and their two daughters. A powerful evocation of time and place, this memoira gifted poet's first book of proseis the story of an inquisitive and sensitive young woman's coming of age and a deeply moving recounting of her reconciliation later in life with the family she left behind. Returning us to a Cold War world marked by divisions of race, gender, wealth, and class, The Prodigal Daughter is an exploration of difference, the powerful wedge that separates individuals within a social milieu and within a family. Echoing the biblical Prodigal Son, Margaret Gibson's memoir is less concerned with the years of excess away from home than with the seeds of division sown in this family's early years. Hers is the story of a mother proud to be a Lady, a Southerner, and a Christian; of two daughters trapped by their mother's power; and of their father's breakdown under social and family expectations. Slow to rebel, young Margaret finally flees the world of manners and customwhich she deems poor substitutes for right thought and right action in the face of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam Warand abandons her fundamentalist upbringing. In a defiant gesture that proves prophetic, she once signed a postcard home The Prodigal. After years of being the distant, absent daughter, she finds herself returning home to meet the needs of her stroke-crippled younger sister and her incapacitated parents. In this tale of homecoming and forgiveness, death and dying, Gibson recounts how she overcame her long indifference to a sister she had thought different from herself, recognizing the strengths of the bonds that both hold us and set us free. Interweaving astute social observations on social pressures, race relations, sibling rivalry, adolescent angst, and more, The Prodigal Daughter is a startlingly honest portrayal of one family in one southern city and the story of all too many families across America.
Author: By Richard W. Unger
The beer of todaybrewed from malted grain and hops, manufactured by large and often multinational corporations, frequently associated with young adults, sports, and drunkennessis largely the result of scientific and industrial developments of the nineteenth century. Modern beer, however, has little in common with the drink that carried that name through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Looking at a time when beer was often a nutritional necessity, was sometimes used as medicine, could be flavored with everything from the bark of fir trees to thyme and fresh eggs, and was consumed by men, women, and children alike, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance presents an extraordinarily detailed history of the business, art, and governance of brewing.During the medieval and early modern periods beer was as much a daily necessity as a source of inebriation and amusement. It was the beverage of choice of urban populations that lacked access to secure sources of potable water; a commodity of economic as well as social importance; a safe drink for daily consumption that was less expensive than wine; and a major source of tax revenue for the state. In Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Richard W. Unger has written an encompassing study of beer as both a product and an economic force in Europe.Drawing from archives in the Low Countries and England to assemble an impressively complete history, Unger describes the transformation of the industry from small-scale production that was a basic part of housewifery to a highly regulated commercial enterprise dominated by the wealthy and overseen by government authorities. Looking at the intersecting technological, economic, cultural, and political changes that influenced the transformation of brewing over centuries, he traces how improvements in technology and in the distribution of information combined to standardize quality, showing how the process of urbanization created the concentrated markets essential for commercial production.Weaving together the stories of prosperous businessmen, skilled brewmasters, and small producers, this impressively researched overview of the social and cultural practices that surrounded the beer industry is rich in implication for the history of the period as a whole.
Author: Donna Tussing Orwin
My aim is to present Tolstoy's work as he may have understood it himself, writes Donna Orwin. Reconstructing the intellectual and psychic struggles behind the masterpieces of his early and middle age, this major study covers the period during which he wrote The Cossacks, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina. Orwin uses the tools of biography, intellectual and literary history, and textual analysis to explain how Tolstoy's tormented search for moral certainty unfolded, creating fundamental differences among the great novels of the pre-crisis period. Distinguished by its historical emphasis, this book demonstrates that the great novelist, who had once seen a fundamental harmony between human conscience and nature's vitality, began eventually to believe in a dangerous rift between the two: during the years discussed here, Tolstoy moved gradually from a celebration of life to instruction about its moral dimensions. Paying special attention to Tolstoy's reading of Rousseau, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and the Russian thinker N. N. Strakhov, Orwin also explores numerous other influences on his thought. In so doing, she shows how his philosophical and emotional conflicts changed form but continued unabated--until, with his religious conversion of 1880, he surrendered his long attempt to make sense of life through art alone.
Author: David Weir
Surveying the American fascination with the Far East since the mid-eighteenth century, this book explains why the Orient had a fundamentally different meaning in the United States than in Europe or Great Britain. David Weir argues that unlike their European counterparts, Americans did not treat the East simply as a site of imperialist adventure; on the contrary, colonial subjugation was an experience that early Americans shared with the peoples of China and India. In eighteenth-century America, the East was, paradoxically, a means of reinforcing the enlightenment values of the West: Franklin, Jefferson, and other American writers found in Confucius a complement to their own political and philosophical beliefs. In the nineteenth century, with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the Hindu Orient emerged as a mystical alternative to American reality. During this period, Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists viewed the Oriental not as an exotic other but as an image of what Americans could be, if stripped of all the commercialism and materialism that set them apart from their ideal. A similar sense of Oriental otherness informed the aesthetic discoveries of the early twentieth century, as Pound, Eliot, and other poets found in Chinese and Japanese literature an artistic purity and intensity absent from Western tradition.