Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory
Author: J. Peter Euben In Corrupting Youth, Peter Euben explores the affinities between Socratic philosophy and Athenian democratic culture as a way to think about issues of politics and education, both ancient and modern. The book moves skillfully between antiquity and the present, from ancient to contemporary political theory, and from Athenian to American democracy. It draws together important recent work by political theorists with the views of classical scholars in ways that shine new light on significant theoretical debates such as those over discourse ethics, rational choice, and political realism, and on political issues such as school vouchers and education reform. Euben not only argues for the generative capacity of classical texts and Athenian political thought, he demonstrates it by thinking with them to provide a framework for reflecting more deeply about socially divisive issues such as the war over the canon and the politicization of the university. Drawing on Aristophanes' Clouds, Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannos, and Plato's Apology of Socrates, Gorgias, and Protagoras, Euben develops a view of democratic political education. Arguing that Athenian democratic practices constituted a tradition of accountability and self-critique that Socrates expanded into a way of doing philosophy, Euben suggests a necessary reciprocity between political philosophy and radical democracy. By asking whether we can or should take Socrates out of the academy and put him back in front of a wider audience, Euben argues for anchoring contemporary higher education in appreciative yet skeptical encounter with the dramatic figure in Plato's dialogues.
Author: Luís de Camões
Luis de Camoes is world famous as the author of the great Renaissance epic The Lusiads, but his large and equally great body of lyric poetry is still almost completely unknown outside his native Portugal. In The Collected Lyric Poems of Luis de Camoes, the award-winning translator of The Lusiads gives English readers the first comprehensive collection of Camoes's sonnets, songs, elegies, hymns, odes, eclogues, and other poems--more than 280 lyrics altogether, all rendered in engaging verse. Camoes (1524-1580) was the first great European artist to cross into the Southern Hemisphere, and his poetry bears the marks of nearly two decades spent in north and east Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, and Macau. From an elegy set in Morocco, to a hymn written at Cape Guardafui on the northern tip of Somalia, to the first modern European love poems for a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camoes's encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places. Translator Landeg White has arranged the poems to follow the order of Camoes's travels, making the book read like a journey. The work of one of the first European cosmopolitans, these poems demonstrate that Camoes would deserve his place among the great poets even if he had never written his epic.
Author: Katherine Reynolds Chaddock
Richard Theodore Greener (18441922) was a renowned black activist and scholar. In 1870, he was the first black graduate of Harvard College. During Reconstruction, he was the first black faculty member at a southern white college, the University of South Carolina. He was even the first black US diplomat to a white country, serving in Vladivostok, Russia. A notable speaker and writer for racial equality, he also served as a dean of the Howard University School of Law and as the administrative head of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument Association. Yet he died in obscurity, his name barely remembered.His black friends and colleagues often looked askance at the light-skinned Greeners ease among whites and sometimes wrongfully accused him of trying to pass. While he was overseas on a diplomatic mission, Greeners wife and five children stayed in New York City, changed their names, and vanished into white society. Greener never saw them again. At a time when Americans viewed themselves simply as either white or not, Greener lost not only his family but also his sense of clarity about race. Richard Greeners story demonstrates the human realities of racial politics throughout the fight for abolition, the struggle for equal rights, and the backslide into legal segregation. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock has written a long overdue narrative biography about a man, fascinating in his own right, who also exemplified Americas discomfiting perspectives on race and skin color. Uncompromising Activist is a lively tale that will interest anyone curious about the human elements of the equal rights struggle.
Author: Julie Sophia Paegle
From the fall of Troy recorded at the beginning of Western poetry to the ongoing mass extinction of species, Twelve Clocks meditates on the temporality of loss across the many scales of our experience and knowledge. Framed by central images of beginnings and ends, this collection searches six cities and intervals of time for the measures of loss, labor, and care. Through formal innovations derived from the second, the minute, the hour, etc., and the methods of their measure, these poems move from the stark violence of Homers tale to the terrible precision and power of the atomic age. As the reader is transported from Las Vegas to Argentina to the landscapes of Ancient Greek epic poetry, Twelve Clocks explores the connections between song, ancestry, family, loss, and time. If the imagery of the collection hints Troy might be an image of the wrecked Argentine economy under neoliberal economics, the poems eschew the abstractions of politics in favor of a vivid and sensuous lyricism. The interconnectivity of the poems in Twelve Clocks is mirrored by different elements transcendence throughout the collection. The clock that goes missing in one poem turns up in another, characters vanish and reappear, matter destroyed in one poem reoccurs as energy in another, and then matter and energy both go missing. Taken together, the poems confront the literary legacy of Western poetic tradition and our shared future.
Author: Robert L. Tignor
The two decades that followed World War II witnessed the end of the great European empires in Asia and Africa. Robert Tignor's new study of the decolonization experiences of Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya elucidates the major factors that led to the transfer of power from British to African hands in these three territories. Employing a comparative method in order to explain the different decolonizing narratives in each territory, he argues that the different state policies toward the private business sector and foreign capital were the result of nationalist policies and attitudes and the influence of Cold War pressures on local events.Using business records as well as official government sources, the work highlights the economic aspects of decolonization and weighs the influence of nationalist movements, changes in metropolitan attitudes toward the empire, and shifts in the international balance of power in bringing about the transfer of authority. The author concludes that the business communities did not play decisive roles, adhering instead to their time-honored role of leaving political issues to colonial officials and their nationalist critics. Tignor also finds that the nationalist movements, far from being ineffective, largely realized the primary goals of nationalist leaders that had been articulated for many decades.Originally published in 1997.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 paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback 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: Karl Kroeber
With the aid of new analytic techniques, including the computer, Karl Kroeber examines the fictional styles of three consecutive English novelists, presenting an objective and systematic comparison of the stylistic coherence of their work.Originally published in 1971.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 paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback 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: By Brian Sutton-Smith
What prompts children to tell stories? What does the word story mean to a child at two or five years of age? The Folkstories of Children, first published in 1981, features nearly five hundred stories that were volunteered by fifty children between the ages of two and ten and transcribed word for word. The stories are organized chronologically by the age of the teller, revealing the progression of verbal competence and the gradual emergence of staging and plot organization. Many stories told by two-year-olds, for example, have only beginnings with no middle or end; the narrative is held together by rhyme or alliteration. After the age of three or four, the same children tell stories that feature a central character and a narrative arc. The stories also exhibit each child's growing awareness and management of his or her environment and life concerns. Some children see their stories as dialogues between teller and audience, others as monologues expressing concerns about fate and the forces of good and evil.Brian Sutton-Smith discusses the possible origins of the stories themselves: folktales, parent and teacher reading, media, required writing of stories in school, dreams, and play. The notes to each chapter draw on this context as well as folktale analysis and child development theory to consider why and how the stories take their particular forms. The Folkstories of Children provides valuable evidence and insight into the ways children actively and inventively engage language as they grow.
Author: Mark Reinberger and Elizabeth McLean
Colonial Americans, if they could afford it, liked to emulate the fashions of London and the style and manners of English country society while at the same time thinking of themselves as distinctly American. The houses they built reflected this ongoing cultural tension. By the mid-eighteenth century, Americans had developed their own version of the bourgeois English countryseat, a class of estate equally distinct in social function and form from townhouses, rural plantations, and farms. The metropolis of Philadelphia was surrounded by a particularly extraordinary collection of country houses and landscapes. Taken together, these estates make up one of the most significant groups of homes in colonial America. In this masterly volume, Mark E. Reinberger, a senior architectural historian, and Elizabeth McLean, an accomplished scholar of landscape history, examine the country houses that the urban gentry built on the outskirts of Philadelphia in response to both local and international economic forces, social imperatives, and fashion. What do these structures and their gardens say about the taste of the people who conceived and executed them? How did their evolving forms demonstrate the persistence of European templates while embodying the spirit of American adaptation? The Philadelphia Country House explores the myriad ways in which these estateswhich were located in the country but responded to the ideas and manners of the citystraddled the cultural divide between urban and rural. Moving from general trends and building principles to architectural interiors and landscape design, Reinberger and McLean take readers on an intimate tour of the fine, fashionable elements found in upstairs parlors and formal gardens. They also reveal the intricate working world of servants, cellars, and kitchen gardens. Highlighting an important aspect of American historic architecture, this handsome volume is illustrated with nearly 150 photographs, more than 60 line drawings, and two color galleries.