Author: Steven Stowell File Type: pdf span orphans 2 widows 2Analyzing the literature on art from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,spanspan orphans 2 widows 2The Spiritual Language of Artspanspan orphans 2 widows 2explores the complex relationship between visual art and spiritual experiences during the Italian Renaissance. Though scholarly research on these writings has predominantly focused on the influence of classical literature, this study reveals that Renaissance authors consistently discussed art using terms, concepts and metaphors derived from spiritual literature. By examining these texts in the light of medieval sources, greater insight is gained on the spiritual nature of the artists process and the reception of art. Offering a close re-readings of many important writers (Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari, etc.), this study deepens our understanding of attitudes toward art and spirituality in the Italian Renaissance.span

Author: Dinko Foretić File Type: pdf

Author: Matthew R. Pembleton File Type: epub The story of Americas War on Drugs usually begins with Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. In Containing Addiction, Matthew R. Pembleton argues that its origins instead lie in the years following World War II, when the Federal Bureau of Narcotics -- the countrys first drug control agency, established in 1930 -- began to depict drug control as a paramilitary conflict and sent agents abroad to disrupt the flow of drugs to American shores. U.S. policymakers had long viewed addiction and organized crime as profound domestic and trans-national threats. Yet World War II presented new opportunities to implement drug control on a global scale. Skeptical of public health efforts to address demand, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics believed that reducing the global supply of drugs was the only way to contain the spread of addiction. In effect, America applied a foreign policy solution to a domestic social crisis, demonstrating how consistently policymakers have assumed that security at home can only be achieved through hegemony abroad. The result is a drug war that persists into the present day. **Review Containing Addiction is a pioneering history of U.S. drug control policy and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that is well written and replete with great detail.Jeremy Kuzmarov, author of The Myth of the Addicted Army Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs Containing Addiction is the first truly comprehensive and sophisticated history of Harry J. Anslingers Federal Bureau of Narcoticsthe often vilified early anti-drug agency that set the terms of Americas long and failed War on Drugs. The book elevates what I have termed the New Drug History to a new level by bringing illicit drugs fully into study of American state power and its foreign relations. Moreover, Pembleton is a lucid, smart, and engaging writer, who will be read by scholars and general audiences alike. This is one of the essential books in American drug history.Paul Gootenberg, author of Andean Cocaine The Making of a Global Drug Matthew R. Pembleton uses narrative, fresh biography, and deep research to nail two important truths. What we call the drug war is really a series of wars stretching back nearly a century. And those wars, like the Cold War with which they overlapped, served many ends, national security interests and partisan politics chief among them. What they did not serve, Pembleton shows, was the goal of keeping Americans free from addiction, a plague worse at the end of a century of drug warring than at the beginning.David Courtwright, author of Dark Paradise and Forces of Habit Containing Addiction reads like a true crime page turner, yet delivers a straight-from-the-archives, lucidly argued history of the narcotics agents who built Americas global drug war.David Herzberg, author of Happy Pills in America From Miltown to Prozac A path-breaking scholarly history told as a thriller, this important book unmasks the intersection of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics with the spread of American empire. Surveillance of private citizens combined with a paranoid vision of continuous American vulnerability to foreign threats to prompt the emergence of a national security state that violated civil liberties and intervened in the affairs of foreign countries. As the war on drugs claims ever more victims at home and abroad, Containing Addiction is essential reading for policy-makers and scholars alike.Max Paul Friedman, author of Rethinking Anti-Americanism The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations About the Author Matthew R. Pembleton is a writer and historian based in the Washington, DC region. He teaches at American University.

Author: Simone Polillo File Type: pdf For decades, the banking industry seemed to be a Swiss watch, quietly ticking along. But the recent financial crisis hints at the true nature of this sector. As Simone Polillo reveals in Conservatives Versus Wildcats, conflict is a driving force. Conservative bankers strive to control money by allying themselves with political elites to restrict access to credit. Barriers to credit create social resistance, so rival bankerswildcatsattempt to subvert the status quo by using money as a tool for breaking existing boundaries. For instance, wildcats may increase the circulation of existing currencies, incorporate new actors in financial markets, or produce altogether new financial instruments to create change. Using examples from the economic and social histories of 19th-century America and Italy, two decentralized polities where challenges to sound banking originated from above and below, this book reveals the collective tactics that conservative bankers devise to legitimize strict boundaries around creditand the transgressive strategies that wildcat bankers employ in their challenge to this restrictive stance. **Review Conservatives versus Wildcats is an ambitious and accomplished book tackling not one but several core problems in economic sociology as well as comparative historical research. These include a theory of finance, the historical evolution of banking in the United States and Italy, the relationship between capitalism and democracy, the definition of money, and the social construction of creditworthiness. More tangentially, the contents inform theories of institutional emergence and research on the larger Western social transition from patrimonialism to bureaucratic and legal rationalism. If this seems like a lot, it should. Simone Polillo was written a book that is both dense and empirically and theoretically rich.Emily Erikson, American Journal of Sociology Polillo brilliantly illustrates how conservatives and wildcats push and pull the financial landscape in the U.S. and Italy, illuminating how financial conflict interacts with political change. This is must read for those interested in the sociology of finance, economic sociology, and international political economy.Professor Leonard Seabrooke, Copenhagen Business School and University of Warwick This handsome study confirms the impression that Polillo is one of the most creative and interesting economic sociologists of a new and coming generation. The books thesisthat finance means conflicts of various typesand the way this argument is presented are both exciting and innovative.Richard Swedberg, Cornell University Polillos Conservatives versus Wildcats is required reading for those interested in the politics of finance.Liam Stanley, Political Studies Review About the Author Simone Polillo is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. With Brad Pasanek, he is co-editor of Beyond Liquidity The Metaphor of Money in Financial Crisis.