The Human Drama of Abortion: A Global Search for Consensus
Author: Aníbal Faúndes and José S. Barzelatto Deeply touched by the tragedies of botched abortions that they witnessed as medical students and young physicians in Chile in the 1940s and later around the world, the authors have attempted in their professional lives and now in this book to establish a framework for dialogue to replace the polarization that exists today. Doctors Faundes and Barzelatto use their decades of international work to document the personal experiences of different classes of women in different countries and those countries' policies and practices. No other book provides such a comprehensive and reasoned examination of the entire topic of abortion, from the medical to the religious and ethical and from the psychological to the legal, in plain language understandable by non-specialists. The central thesis is that there are too many induced abortions in the world today, that most are preventable and should be prevented--a middle ground that both pro-life and pro-choice advocates can accept. The first part of the book reviews why women have abortions, as well as the magnitude and consequences. The second part examines values. The third part discusses effective interventions. The final part states conclusions about what can be done to reach a necessary social consensus. The Portuguese edition of this book was issued at the very end of 2004. The Spanish edition, launched in mid-2005, is already in a second printing. The authors are making presentations at special events sponsored by universities, professional associations, and feminist networks in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and the United States.
Author: Mark Denny
Ever since Nobel Prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene to describe our current eraone in which human impact on the environment has pushed Earth into an entirely new geological epocharguments for and against the new designation have been raging. Finally, an official working group of scientists was created to determine once and for all whether we humans have tossed one too many plastic bottles out the car window and wrought a change so profound as to be on par with the end of the last ice age. In summer 2016, the answer came back: Yes. In Making the Most of the Anthropocene, scientist Mark Denny tackles this hard truth head-on and considers burning questions: How did we reach our present technological and ecological state? How are we going to cope with our uncertain future? Will we come out of this, or are we doomed as a species? Is there anything we can do about what happens next? This book explains what the Anthropocene is and why it is important offers suggestions for minimizing harm instead of fretting about an impending environmental apocalypse combines easy-to-grasp scientific, technological, economic, and anthropological analyses In Making the Most of the Anthopocene, there are no equations, no graphs, and no impenetrable jargon. Instead, youll find a fascinating cast of characters, including journalists from outer space, peppered moths, and unjustly maligned Polynesians. In his bright, lively voice, Denny envisions a future that balances reaction and reason, one in which humanity emerges bloody but unbowedand in which those of us who are prepared can make the most of the Anthropocene.
Author: Robin E. Jensen
This book explores the arguments, appeals, and narratives that have defined the meaning of infertility in the modern history of the United States and Europe. Throughout the last century, the inability of women to conceive children has been explained by discrepant views: that women are individually culpable for their own reproductive health problems, or that they require the intervention of medical experts to correct abnormalities. Using doctor-patient correspondence, oral histories, and contemporaneous popular and scientific news coverage, Robin Jensen parses the often thin rhetorical divide between moralization and medicalization, revealing how dominating explanations for infertility have emerged from seemingly competing narratives. Her longitudinal account illustrates the ways in which old arguments and appeals do not disappear in the light of new information, but instead reemerge at subsequent, often seemingly disconnected moments to combine and contend with new assertions.Tracing the transformation of language surrounding infertility from barrenness to (in)fertility, this rhetorical analysis both explicates how language was and is used to establish the concept of infertility and shows the implications these rhetorical constructions continue to have for individuals and the societies in which they live.
Author: edited by Esther Kingston-Mann and Tim Sieber
High school was like a penance imposed for some unknown sin. Everything I ever learned that was important was learned outside of school. So I never thought to associate schools with learning. (Amy, UMass Boston student)Today's diverse and financially burdened students enter higher education eager to succeed at institutions originally designed for culturally homogenous and predominantly white middle-class populations. They are expected to learn from faculty trained primarily as researchers. Unsurprisingly, student dropout and faculty burnout rates are high, leading some conservatives to demand that higher education purge itself of unqualified students and teachers. But, as Achieving Against the Odds demonstrates, new and better solutions emerge once we assume that both faculty and students still possess a mutual potential for learning when they meet in the college classroom.This collection -- drawing on the experiences of faculty at the University of Massachusetts-Boston -- documents a complex and challenging process of pedagogical transformation. The contributors come from a wide range of disciplines -- American studies, anthropology, Asian American studies, English, ESL, history, language, political science, psychology, sociology, and theology. Like their students, they bring a variety of backgrounds into the classroom -- as people of color, women, gays, working class people, and foreigners of one sort or another. Together they have engaged in an exciting struggle to devise pedagogies which respond to the needs and life experiences of their students and to draw each of them into a dialogue with the content and methodology of their disciplines. Courageously airing their own mistakes and weaknesses alongside their breakthroughs, they illuminate for the reader a process of teaching transformation by which discipline-trained scholars discover how to promote the learning of diverse students. As one reads their essays, one is struck by how much these faculty have benefited from the insights they have gleaned from colleagues as well as students. Through argument and examples, personal revelation and references as well as students. Through argument and examples, personal revelation and references to authority, they draw the reader into their community. This is a book to inspire and enlighten everyone interested in making higher education more truly democratic, inclusive and intellectually challenging for today's students.
Author: Mark Stein
From outlawing bowling in colonial America to regulating violent video games and synthetic drugs today, Mark Steins Vice Capades examines thenations relationship with the actions, attitudes, and antics that have definedmorality. This humorous and quirky history revealsthat our views of vice are formed not merely by morals but by power. While laws against nude dancing have become less restrictive, laws restricting sexual harassment have been enacted. While marijuana is no longer illegal everywhere, restrictive laws have been enacted against cigarettes. Steinexamines this nations inconsistent moral compass and how the powers-that-be in each era determine what is or is not deemed a vice.From the Puritans who founded Massachusetts with unyielding, biblically based lawsto those modern purveyors of morality who currently campaign against video game violence, Vice Capadeslooks at the American history we all know from a fresh and exciting perspective and shows how vice has shaped our nation, sometimes without us even knowing it.
Author: James J. Donahue
In Failed Frontiersmen, James Donahue writes that one of the founding and most persistent mythologies of the United States is that of the American frontier. Looking at a selection of twentieth-century American male fiction writersE. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor, and Cormac McCarthyhe shows how they reevaluated the historical romance of frontier mythology in response to the social and political movements of the 1960s (particularly regarding the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the treatment of Native Americans). Although these writers focus on different moments in American history and different geographic locations, the author reveals their commonly held belief that the frontier mythology failed to deliver on its promises of cultural stability and political advancement, especially in the face of the multicultural crucible of the 1960s.Cultural Frames, Framing CultureAmerican Literatures Initiative
Author: Jose Itzigsohn
The descendents of twentieth-century southern and central European immigrants successfully assimilated into mainstream American culture and generally achieved economic parity with other Americans within several generations. So far, that is not the case with recent immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. A compelling case study of first- and second-generation Dominicans in Providence, Rhode Island, Encountering American Faultlines suggests that even as immigrants and their children increasingly participate in American life and culture, racialization and social polarization remain key obstacles to further progress. Encountering American Faultlines uses occupational and socioeconomic data and in-depth interviews to address key questions about the challenges Dominicans encounter in American society. What is their position in the American socioeconomic structure? What occupations do first- and second-generation Dominicans hold as they enter the workforce? How do Dominican families fare economically? How do Dominicans identify themselves in the American racial and ethnic landscape? The first generation works largely in what is left of Providences declining manufacturing industry. Second-generation Dominicans do better than their parents economically, but even as some are able to enter middle-class occupations, the majority remains in the service-sector working class. Jose Itzigsohn suggests that the third generation will likely continue this pattern of stratification, and he worries that the chances for further economic advancement in the next generation may be seriously in doubt. While transnational involvement is important to first-generation Dominicans, the second generation concentrates more on life in the United States and empowering their local communities. Itzigsohn ties this to the second generations tendency to embrace panethnic identities. Panethnic identity provides Dominicans with choices that defy strict American racial categories and enables them to build political coalitions across multiple ethnicities. This intimate study of the Dominican immigrant experience proposes an innovative theoretical approach to look at the contemporary forms and meanings of becoming American. Jose Itzigsohn acknowledges the social exclusion and racialization encountered by the Dominican population, but he observes that, by developing their own group identities and engaging in collective action and institution building at the local level, Dominicans can distinguish themselves and make inroads into American society. But Encountering American Faultlines also finds that hard work and hope have less to do with their social mobility than the existing economic and racial structures of U.S. society.
Author: Richard Saunders
This compilation of Dale Morgan’s historical work on Indians in the Intermountain West focuses primarily on the Shoshone who lived near the Oregon and California trails. Three connected works by Morgan are included: First is his classic article on the history of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs. This is followed by an important set of government reports and correspondence from the National Archives concerning the Eastern Shoshone and their leader Washakie. Morgan heavily annotated these for serial publication in the Annals of Wyoming. He also wrote a previously unpublished history of early relations among the Western Shoshone, emigrants, and the government along the California Trail. Morgan biographer Richard L. Saunders introduced, edited, and further annotated this collection. His introduction includes an intellectual biography of Morgan that focuses on the place of the anthologized pieces in Morgan’s corpus. Gregory E. Smoak, a leading historian of the Shoshone, contributed an ethnohistorical essay as additional context for Morgan’s work.
Author: Gottfried Dietze
The Federalista treatise on free government in peace and securityis one of the most important contributions to the literature on constitutional democracy and federalism in the United States. Scholars, lawyers, judges, and statesmen in the United States and abroad have lauded the impact of The Federalist. John Quincy Adams referred to the papers as a classical work in the English language, and a commentary on the Constitution of the United States, of scarcely less authority than the Constitution itself. Since the publication of the papers, historians have analyzed the collected work from a variety of approaches, but at the time that Gottfried Dietze wrote in 1960, scholars mainly concentrated on specific components of The Federalist. Dietze intervened in this scholarship by offering a comprehensive study of the work, which promoted federalism as both a means for establishing free government and securing peace within a federal state and for maintaining security under the threat of foreign powers. In addition to a theoretical examination of the text, Dietze brings in a historical component by fleshing out how its authors were shaped by the political atmosphere in which they lived and how their writings transformed political literature for generations to come
Author: Julie Rugg
This book explores, for the first time, the turbulent social history of churchyards and cemeteries over the last 150 years. Using sites from across rural North Yorkshire, the text examines the workings of the Burial Acts and discloses the ways in which religious politics framed burial management. It presents an alternative history of burial which questions notions of tradition and modernity, and challenges long-standing assumptions about changing attitudes towards mortality in England. This study diverges from the long-standing tendency to regard the churchyard as inherently traditional and the cemetery as essentially modern. Since 1850, both types of site have been subject to the influence of new expectations that burial space would guarantee family burial and the opportunity for formal commemoration. Although the population in central North Yorkshire declined, demand for burial space rose, meaning that many dozens of churchyards were extended, and forty new cemeteries were laid out. This text is accessible to undergraduates and postgraduates, and will be an essential resource for historians, archaeologists and local government officials.