Life on the Rocks: A Portrait of the American Mountain Goat
Author: by Bruce L. Smith The American mountain goat is one of the most elusive and least familiar species of hoofed mammals in North America. Confined to the remote and rugged mountains of the western United States and Canada, these extraordinary mountaineers are seldom seen or encountered, even by those who patiently study them. Life on the Rocks offers an intimate portrayal of this remarkable animal through the eyes and lens of field biologist and photographer Bruce Smith.Color photographs and accounts of Smith's personal experiences living in Montana's Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area accompany descriptions of the American mountain goat's natural history. Smith explores their treacherous habitat, which spans the perilous cliffs and crags of the Rocky, Cascade, and Coast mountain ranges. The physical and behavioral adaptations of these alpine athletes enable them to survive a host of dangers, including six-month-long winters, scarce food sources, thunderous avalanches, social strife, and predators like wolves, bears, lions, wolverines, and eagles. Smith also details the challenges these animals face as their territory is threatened by expanding motorized access, industrial activities, and a warming climate.Life on the Rocks showcases the elegance and charm of this little-known creature, thriving in some of North America's harshest wilderness. Smith's volume will appeal to wildlife enthusiasts, wildland travelers, and conservationists interested in the future of the American mountain goat.
Train Up a Child explores how private schools in Old Order Amish communities reflect and perpetuate churchcommunity values and identity Here Karen M JohnsonWeiner asserts that the reinforcement of those values among children is imperative to the survival of these communities in the modern world Surveying settlements in Indiana Michigan Ohio Pennsylvania and New York JohnsonWeiner finds that although Old Order communities have certain similarities in their codes of conduct there is no standard Old Order school She examines the choices each community makesabout pedagogy curriculum textbooks even school designto strengthen religious ideology preserve the social and linguistic markers of Old Order identity and protect their own communitys beliefs and values from the influence of the dominant society In the most comprehensive study of Old Order schools to date JohnsonWeiner provides valuable insight into how variables such as community size and relationship with other Old Order groups affect the role of these schools in maintaining behavioral norms and in shaping the Old Orders response to modernity
Author: Ben Minteer
This important book brings together leading environmental thinkers to debate a central conflict within environmental philosophy: should we appreciate nature mainly for its ability to advance our interests or should we respect it as having a good of its own, apart from any contribution to human well-being? Specifically, the fourteen essays collected here discuss the convergence hypothesis put forth by Bryan Nortona controversial thesis in environmental ethics about the policy implications of moral arguments for environmental protection. Historically influential essays are joined with newly-commissioned essays to provide the first sustained attempt to reconcile two long-opposed positions. Bryan Norton himself offers the books closing essay.This seminal volume contains contributions from some of the most respected scholars in the field, including Donald Brown, J. Baird Callicott, Andrew Light, Holmes Rolston III, Laura Westra, and many others. Although Nature in Common? will be especially useful for students and professionals studying environmental ethics and philosophy, it will engage any reader who is concerned about the philosophies underlying contemporary environmental policies.
Author: Elizabeth Anderson
More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, but The Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy. Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action. Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy.
Author: Alexander Samson
The co-monarchy of Mary I and Philip II put England at the heart of early modern Europe. This positive reassessment of their joint reign counters a series of parochial, misogynist and anti-Catholic assumptions, correcting the many myths that have grown up around the marriage and explaining the reasons for its persistent marginalisation in the historiography of sixteenth-century England. Using new archival discoveries and original sources, the book argues for Mary as a great Catholic queen, while fleshing out Philips important contributions as king of England. It demonstrates the many positive achievements of this dynastic union in everything from culture, music and art to cartography, commerce and exploration. An important corrective for anyone interested in the history of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain.
Author: Simon Wolfgang Fuchs
Centering Pakistan in a story of transnational Islam stretching from South Asia to the Middle East, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs offers the first in-depth ethnographic history of the intellectual production of Shi'is and their religious competitors in this Land of the Pure. The notion of Pakistan as the pinnacle of modern global Muslim aspiration forms a crucial component of this story. It has empowered Shi'is, who form about twenty percent of the country's population, to advance alternative conceptions of their religious hierarchy while claiming the support of towering grand ayatollahs in Iran and Iraq. Fuchs shows how popular Pakistani preachers and scholars have boldly tapped into the esoteric potential of Shi'ism, occupying a creative and at times disruptive role as brokers, translators, and self-confident pioneers of contemporary Islamic thought.They have indigenized the Iranian Revolution and formulated their own ideas for fulfilling the original promise of Pakistan. Challenging typical views of Pakistan as a mere Shi'i backwater, Fuchs argues that its complex religious landscape represents how a local, South Asian Islam may open up space for new intellectual contributions to global Islam. Yet religious ideology has also turned Pakistan into a deadly battlefield: sectarian groups since the 1980s have been bent on excluding Shi'is as harmful to their own vision of an exemplary Islamic state.
Author: John Frederick Martin
In examining the founding of New England towns during the seventeenth century, John Frederick Martin investigates an old subject with fresh insight. Whereas most historians emphasize communalism and absence of commerce in the seventeenth century, Martin demonstrates that colonists sought profits in town-founding, that town founders used business corporations to organize themselves into landholding bodies, and that multiple and absentee landholding was common.In reviewing some sixty towns and the activities of one hundred town founders, Martin finds that many town residents were excluded from owning common lands and from voting. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century, when proprietors separated from towns, that town institutions emerged as fully public entities for the first time.Martin's study will challenge historians to rethink not only social history but also the cultural history of early New England. Instead of taking sides in the long-standing debate between Puritan scholars and business historians, Martin identifies strains within Puritanism and the rest of the colonists' culture that both discouraged and encouraged land commerce, both supported and undermined communalism, both hindered and hastened development of the wilderness. Rather than portray colonists one-dimensionally, Martin analyzes how several different and competing ethics coexisted within a single, complex, and vibrant New England culture.
Author: Jason N. Blum
Zen and the Unspeakable God reevaluates how we study mystical experience. Forsaking the prescriptive epistemological box that has constrained the conversation for decades, ensuring that methodology has overshadowed subject matter, Jason Blum proposes a new interpretive approachone that begins with a mystics own beliefs about the nature of mystical experience. Blum brings this approach to bear on the experiential accounts of three mystical exemplars: Meister Eckhart, Ibn al-Arabi, and Hui-neng. Through close readings of their texts, he uncovers the mystics own fundamental assumptions about transcendence and harnesses these as interpretive guides to their experiences.The predominant theory-first path to interpretation has led to the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of individual mystical experiences and fostered specious conclusions about cross-cultural comparability among them. Blums hermeneutic invites the scholarly community to begin thinking about mystical experience in a new waythrough the mystics eyes. Zen and the Unspeakable God offers a sampling of the provocative results of this technique and an explanation of its implications for theories of consciousness and our contemporary understanding of the nature of mystical experience.
Author: David Scheffer
Within days of Madeleine Albright's confirmation as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, she instructed David Scheffer to spearhead the historic mission to create a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. As senior adviser to Albright and then as President Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Scheffer was at the forefront of the efforts that led to criminal tribunals for the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, and that resulted in the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court. All the Missing Souls is Scheffer's gripping insider's account of the international gamble to prosecute those responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and to redress some of the bloodiest human rights atrocities in our time. Scheffer reveals the truth behind Washington's failures during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the anemic hunt for notorious war criminals, how American exceptionalism undercut his diplomacy, and the perilous quests for accountability in Kosovo and Cambodia. He takes readers from the killing fields of Sierra Leone to the political back rooms of the U.N. Security Council, providing candid portraits of major figures such as Madeleine Albright, Anthony Lake, Richard Goldstone, Louise Arbour, Samuel Sandy Berger, Richard Holbrooke, and Wesley Clark, among others. A stirring personal account of an important historical chapter, All the Missing Souls provides new insights into the continuing struggle for international justice.
Author: Edited by Thomas C. Mackey
A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era is the first comprehensive collection of public policy actions, political speeches, and judicial decisions related to the American Civil War. Collectively, the four volumes in this series give scholars, teachers, and students easy access to the full texts of the most important, fundamental documents as well as hard-to-find, rarely published primary sources on this critical period in U.S. history. The first two volumes of the series, Legislative Achievements and Political Arguments, were released last year. The final installment, Judicial Decisions, is divided into two volumes. The first volume, spanning the years 1857 to 1866, was released last year. This second volume of Judicial Decisions covers the years 1867 to 1896. Included here are some of the classic judicial decisions of this time such as the 1869 decision in Texas v. White and the first judicial interpretation of the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment, the 1873 Slaughter- House Cases. Other decisions are well known to specialists but deserve wider readership and discussion, such as the 1867 state and 1878 federal cases that upheld the separation of the races in public accommodations (and thus constituted the common law of common commerce) long before the more notorious 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson (also included). These judicial voices constitute a lasting and often overlooked aspect of the age of Abraham Lincoln. Mackeys headnotes and introductory essays situate cases within their historical context and trace their lasting significance. In contrast to decisions handed down during the war, these judicial decisions lasted well past their immediate political and legal moment and deserve continued scholarship and scrutiny. This document collection presents the raw stuff of the Civil War era so that students, scholars, and interested readers can measure and gauge how that generation met Lincolns challenge to think anew, and act anew. A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era is an essential acquisition for academic and public libraries in addition to being a valuable resource for courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, legal history, political history, and nineteenth-century American history.