Bøger udgivet af Academica Press

Fifth Century Athens, in its Golden Age, was at once the most powerful and the most democratic of the Greek city-states: this precarious combination called into being a new art, the art of oratory, whereby the wealth and prominence of a political career could be won by mere speech. Itinerant teachers of these new techniques of persuasion bedazzled up-and-coming men with the prospect of power and fame, and taught them for a significant fee. Of these the most dazzling was Gorgias of Sicily.But speech is the articulation of thought, thought the world of the soul, and the soul the seat of conscience and self-knowledge. By a miracle to which we owe the foundations of our Western Civilization, philosophy was born in Athens during this same period, most saliently in the person of Socrates, whose life exactly coincided with the Athenian Golden Age. He discovered the life of the mind, and found a way to live that life with others, his fellow citizens, by an activity quite different from oratory and lecture, which he called dialogue. The orator thinks language his tool, but in dialogue with Socrates he might discover that language knows him better than he knows himself and leaves him no place to hide: he might choose silence instead. This is the first complete study of the text in English for sixty years.

Afrikaners have long been portrayed as the villains of South Africa's apartheid state. Because they were such intensely vilified pariahs, many Americans and Europeans remain intrigued by Afrikaners as a vestige of white nationalism living in Africa who nevertheless peacefully transferred political power to South Africa's black majority. Afrikaner Identity tells the longer story of the Afrikaners, starting with the emergence of an accidental Dutch colony at Cape Town in the seventeenth century, and explores how these people came to see themselves distinctly as Afrikaners ("Africans") and why this identity assumed the shape that it did over time. Further, the book unpacks the complex interactions between the emergent identity of "Afrikaner-ness" and the slaves they imported from Asia, Cape-based Khoisan clans, British settlers, and (later) the tribes of the African interior. Eric Louw explains how 150 years of Afrikaner conflict with British imperialism played a pivotal role in shaping Afrikaner identity and also gave rise to the phenomenon of Afrikaner nationalism. Louw also tells how Afrikaner migration modified the community's identity as it came into contact with black Africans. This encounter not only shaped the future of Southern Africa but also influenced how Afrikaners came to view themselves as they faced the new challenges of British hegemony, the Boer War, and the rise of Afrikaner nationalism over the first half of the twentieth century, a process that eventually replaced British power with Afrikaner hegemony and imposed apartheid, in part to deconstruct the British-made state of South Africa. Afrikaner Identity concludes with the transition to black-majority rule since 1994 and Afrikaners' new role as a politically disempowered white minority with new challenges to their identity.

Steel Workers in India discusses the factors that determine organizational climate and employee job satisfaction in the Salem Steel Plant. In this study, job satisfaction is delineated by twelve distinct dimensions, namely human resources policies and welfare measures, work stress, employee promotion, communication, pay and operations circumstances, nature of work, rewards system, safety measures, appraisal systems. Organizational climate is approach in four dimensions: humanistic climate, autonomous climate, flexible climate, and job dimension climate. These associations are framed into a central hypothesis suggesting that there is a strong correlation between organizational climate and job satisfaction. Organizational climate and job satisfaction reinforce each other, for the common ground connecting those concepts is employee perception. Hence the organizational climate and employee job satisfaction are essential reciprocal components for a workplace's overall performance.

In From Metaphysics to Decision Making, Alexander Mitjashin argues that the laws of logic should be regarded as a paraphrase of an ontology - an understanding of "being" - whose components are distinct one from another, no matter how similar we may consider them. This approach allows us to remove antinomies without using any axiomatic method. The bases of that ontology are much easier to understand than the ones of symbolic logic and may enable us to introduce optimal societal decision making in the realm of public policy. Since metaphysics implies no choice in general methods of thought, it should exclude skepticism. Using Emmy Noether's theorem of physics, in its simplest and most easily understandable form, we can infer that the problem of skeptical doubts of David Hume's kind are removed.

From Natura to Nature traces the career of the medieval goddess Natura - Mother Nature - as she influenced the literature of the High Middle Ages up to the time of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. After that, Natura's medieval aspect morphed into the mathematics of the early modern era. The book's subtitle includes the terms Love, Integrity, and Imagination, subjects that complement Natura's well-known sponsorship of the phenomenon of romantic love. Imagination seems first to have been used in a philosophical sense by Alanus ab Insulis (Alain de Lille), who was also Natura's first devoted author and the apparent inventor of imagination in its quasi-modern sense; the modern history of imagination is well-known to anyone who has tackled Samuel Taylor Coleridge's philosophical prose. In Terry Hipolito's view, "integrity" can be ambiguous, and he attempts to encapsulate it in both moral and mathematical forms. He focuses on Dante, Chaucer, and two anonymous authors of English works, Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, who fuse two meanings of integer, most notably here using symbolic numerals in their structure. Just as Shakespeare was concluding his career with his romances, a German work appeared, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. While in Shakespeare's last romances the heroes have become middle aged (to us) or old (to Renaissance audiences), in Rosenkreutz the numerical symbolism is, to any but a rococo taste, overdone. This was exactly the time when arithmetic ceased being symbolic and became overwhelming mathematical, as studies in logarithms, abstract algebra, and, finally, calculus put a definitive stamp upon what we still think of as modernity, and the analysis of categories became a unique feature of modernity. By the early twentieth century, calculus gave way to statistics. Even as Albert Einstein declared that God does not play dice with the universe, he nevertheless allowed that physics, chance, and statistics are the key to the subterranean life of matter. Nowadays quanta are bundled in mathematical objects which uncannily resemble the complex symbolic integers of old.

The Law of Interrogations and Confessions traces the evolution of the primary approaches that U.S. courts have taken to regulating the interrogation of suspects by law enforcement officers. It examines the due process approach to the voluntariness of statements; the short-lived "focus of the investigation" test of Escobedo v. Illinois; the landmark Fifth Amendment approach announced in Miranda v. Arizona; and the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel approach to regulating the "deliberate elicitation" of incriminating statements. Henry F. Fradella's authoritative book focuses on lower court interpretations of leading U.S. Supreme Court precedents with regard to issues such as determining when someone is in "custody" and subject to "interrogation" for Fifth Amendment purposes; the form, manner, and timing of Miranda warnings; the impact of multiple interrogations; the validity and scope of expressed and implied waivers; and the counters of Sixth Amendment protections to preserve suspects' rights to counsel in the interrogation context after formal criminal proceedings have been initiated.

Octogenarian Jack Foley's COLLISIONS is a book at play in the forests of the mind. The opening quotation from Dana Gioia defines the book's understanding of consciousness: "Human consciousness is an unstable republic of conflicting impulses, instincts, and appetites in perpetual flux." COLLISIONS is an attempt to honor that notion of the chaos of consciousness while at the same time giving the reader an experience of thought and feeling that is not so chaotic that it is overwhelming. It tries to tell the truth about the mind in a way that feels if not comfortable at least familiar: we too have felt that fire, that movement. The book asserts that the fundamental condition of poetry is words in motion, constantly dis/uncovering perceptions of the new. "Ecstasy seems to be linked to the instability of language." Familiar with the many forms of traditional poetry and comfortable with the making of new forms, Foley conceives of every living poet as an Orpheus attempting to rescue poetry-as-Eurydice. If poetry to some extent reveals the ramifications of the poet's identity, it does so in the context of the coruscations of words whose flashes move beyond identity into something more. The book deliberately plunges us into mystery as everything collides with everything else. Foley writes to a fellow poet, "'Home' is where you belong but 'home' isn't anywhere: it is always a profound absence: 'sound, noise that reaches for the ever-receding light.' I think that, underneath all the 'influences, ' is this deep longing which is always asserted and always denied." Baudelaire: "heaven or hell who cares / In the depths of the unknown to find something new."

On The Warpath is an autobiographical account of controversial anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss's storied career on the front lines of the culture war in our colleges and universities. Her opposition to the reburial of Native American skeletal remains, her insistence that indigenous knowledge is not science but myth, and her fight against wokeism and political correctness in academia exposed her to numerous controversies and cancel culture campaigns, and a court case. A photograph of Weiss with a skull - as natural to anthropologists as a doctor being pictured with a stethoscope - led to her university shutting her out of the collection and changing the locks. This became an international news story, as did the American Anthropological Association canceling one of her presentations because she explained that a skeleton's sex is binary and not gender fluid. This hard-hitting and often humorous book tells the story of Dr. Weiss's fight for science against superstition, and her attempts to promote free speech and academic freedom. It also exposes the current rot in today's universities, through the lens of her battles against day-to-day absurdities. These include an attempt to bar "menstruating personnel" (formerly known as women) from the curation facility, a campaign to ban research on ancient Carthaginian remains because the individuals concerned never consented to photography, and a plan to declare X-rays sacred, so that they can be repatriated to Native Americans (who may actually be Mexicans), prior to being burned or buried.

In the labyrinth of human experience, language stands as both a monument to our ingenuity and a barrier to our understanding. It is the medium through which we convey not just thoughts and ideas but the very essence of our cultures, emotions, and identities. Yet, in its complexity lies a challenge--a challenge that has persisted through the ages, morphing with the times but never diminishing in significance. This challenge is translation: the art and science of carrying meaning from one language into another, of finding equivalence where none seems to exist, and of bridging the vast chasms that separate human experiences. In Other Words: A Journey through Translation, Interpretation, and Meaning is an exploration of this intricate process, a deep dive into the heart of how we understand and misunderstand each other across the linguistic divides that define us.

What are the unequivocal causes of a scientific revolution? In The Origin of Scientific Revolutions, Rinat Nugayev proposes an ideal model that strives to reconcile cognitive and social facets of the advancement of science and to provide analytical tools for studying the social mechanisms by which diverse structures of scientific knowledge evolve and interweave. Like Bruno Latour, Nugayev strengthens efforts in landing the sky-high epistemological models of scientific revolutions. In the wake of Stephen Shapin, Philip Kitcher, and Helen Longino, this book takes a further step on the path of explanation for the mundane reasons for the triumph of the novel paradigm over the old one. Yet a corresponding expansion of the epistemological basis of research requires historical analysis of the forms of rationality in the "phenomenological perspective" proposed by Husserl and Heidegger. The history of cognition constitutes a series of epochs of' "unconcealment," with the integrity of each 'mathematical projection of nature' provided by reconciliation, plexus, and interpenetration of sundry practices. Profound breakthroughs in science were not due to ingenious contrivances of brave novel paradigms or invention of immaculate ideas ex nihilo. The breakthroughs were caused, among other things, by the harrowing piecemeal processes of accommodation, interpenetration, and intertwinement of old research traditions preceding the radical breaks.

Narrative Medicine in Action: Lessons from the Maternal Mortality Project addresses the United States's ongoing maternal health crisis by extracting findings from eighteen underrepresented women's interviews using narrative medical research that is analyzed through the reproductive justice framework. To mitigate obstetric abuse and adverse birthing experiences, Dr. Kenya Mitchell concludes by recommending three collaborative care models that integrate diverse birth workers who are paid a living wage into existing maternal care systems.

In this vividly written, politically-oriented travelogue, Tomás Klvaňa offers a stark narrative of his decade-long travels to Cuba, interweaving a political analysis of the country's current state with a critical assessment of the ideology that has shaped its development. Cuba: A Brief History of the End reveals an immersive tableau of tropical landscapes that set the stage for the human stories that have unfolded in the shadow of the communist regime. The narrative tells of the author's encounters, ranging from the dramatic to the humorously absurd, with figures such as anti-communist dissidents, activists, independent journalists, and citizens struggling to survive in a challenging environment. He takes readers through iconic locations, from the tobacco valleys of Viñales and the urban sprawl of Pinar del Río to the eastern reaches of Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo. Historic sites such as the Bay of Pigs and Havana's Plaza de la Revolución serve as backdrops for an exploration of the political upheavals of the past seventy years, which have not only captured the attention of global powers, but have also deeply affected life in Central Europe. The book draws parallels between Cuban communism and Czechoslovakia's "era of normalization" in the 1970s and 1980s, while also reflecting on historical figures such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Ernest Hemingway, whose artistic legacy is closely tied to Cuba.

John Millington Synge, who along with William Butler Yeats and Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory spearheaded the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century, was chiefly inspired by the four trips he took to the Aran Islands in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Synge was born into a prominent, if fading, landholding family of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy. After taking his degree at Trinity College, Dublin, he used his modest income to live in Europe in hopes of becoming a writer. His life took a decisive turn in Paris, where he met Yeats, who urged him to visit the Aran Islands - rocky, Irish-speaking outposts off the coast of Galway, and there "find a life that he has never found expression." Synge's resulting visits and the highly charged poetic language that flowed from them in prose, verse and, most of all, drama, changed the course of Irish and world literature. James MacGuire examines Synge's background and early life, recounts the origins of the Irish Literary Revival, and compares and contrasts Synge's writing on the Aran Islands with earlier and later accounts. This study also examines Synge's work using Thomas Hardy as a contemporary point of reference in rural literature as well as Synge's influence on later Irish dramatists, including Sean O'Casey, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, and, in the twenty-first century, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh, and Mikel Murfi. The book concludes with an appreciation of Synge's continuing influence on Irish literature and Irish nationalism generally.

What is postmodernism -- postmodernism as philosophy -- and what should we think of it? The first eight chapters of Julian Young's new book examine the thought of key postmodernist philosophers: Lyotard, Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, Vattimo, Rorty, and Judith Butler. In the final chapter, Young turns to the question of what makes them "postmodernists." His conclusion is that postmodernism is best thought of as composed of two elements: "descriptive postmodernism" and "normative postmodernism." Descriptive postmodernism is the sociological thesis that in the middle of the twentieth century a rupture occurred in Western society that was sufficiently radical to differentiate "modernity" and "postmodernity" into two different historical epochs. What defines our new epoch is, above all, the loss of "grand narratives" -- or, as Nietzsche called it, "the death of God." Normative postmodernism is the view that we should accept, even celebrate, our "postmodern condition." With some exceptions, postmodernist philosophers subscribe to both the descriptive and the normative theses. Young argues that while descriptive postmodernism presents an essentially true account of our current cultural condition, that condition is a pathological development in the history of the West. Since postmodern philosophy welcomes the condition it, too, he concludes, is a pathological development. Grand narratives are something we need, so we should not celebrate their loss. Postmodernists, in Young's assessment, use obscure and fuzzy language. Generally hailing from literary rather than philosophical backgrounds, their commentators are often even more obscurer and fuzzier. Writing as a philosopher, Young attempts to subject the postmodernists to philosophical standards of cogency and clarity.

Scholars of Richard Wagner's works have long noted his numerous comparisons between their characters and plots in his letters, essays, and recorded remarks. Yet no one has previously attempted to assess their implications for our understanding of his art systematically. Paul Heise's quest to grasp the allegorical unity underlying Wagner's canonical artworks began in the 1970s. Following his allegorical interpretation of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, The Wound That Will Never Heal (Academica Press, 2021), this fresh installment of Heise's lifelong Wagner project will demonstrate how the composer employed key facets of the plots of his first three canonical operas The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin in building the sophisticated allegorical superstructure which culminated in his Ring of the Nibelung and his other mature music-dramas, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal. This study casts a retrospective light on the many meanings hidden within these three operas, which were the prequel to the Ring, revealing their heretofore subliminal content as never before.

Scholars devoted to analysis of Richard Wagner's operas and music-dramas have long noted his numerous comparisons between their characters and plots in his letters, essays, and recorded remarks. Yet no one has previously attempted to assess their implications for our systematic understanding of his art. Following Heise's allegorical interpretation of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, The Wound That Will Never Heal (Academica Press, 2021), this second installment of the author's lifelong Wagner project will examine Wagner's mature music-dramas Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal in light of their relationship to the Ring as understood through Heise's allegorical interpretation. It will demonstrate how Wagner's Ring is a master-myth which can make sense of these other mature music-dramas as never before.

America is suffering from a deep spiritual crisis. The national polarization that so many miscast as political is really a conflict between two spiritual solutions pointing in drastically different directions. One is Wokeism, a new religion that speaks most clearly to America's spiritually starved young, urban, credentialed, professional elites. Its unique takes on race, gender, climate, virology, and misinformation provide adherents with an understanding of persistent unfairness and inequality, pervasive evil, the true self, the end of days, the source of ritual, and the dangers of blasphemy-effectively filling core spiritual needs without ever conceding that such needs exist. The Woke, who deny that theirs is a faith, are rapidly turning Wokeism into the established religion of the United States. The other solution is the American Spirit, a reconnection with our nation's spiritual roots and the traditional faiths that fueled them. For far too long, we have denied the existence of such a spirit, seen it as a source of shame, buried it, or recast it as an embarrassing artifact of an older time. The way forward thus requires us to face a harsh reality: we are mired in a deep spiritual crisis, the new religion of Wokeism is ascendant, and only a revival of America's founding spirit can preserve the American nation and save the Republic.

America and the West are now in the penultimate stage of a revolution defined by "wokeness." What we call "partisanship" is essentially the effect of the late but growing realization of the revolution's opponents that they face a major threat to their interests, convictions, and ways of life. It is not the "wokerati," but their likely victims who are waking up. What they see is how a large number of social trends that may have posed little danger separately-mass migration made more divisive by multiculturalism; the rise of identity politics; the imposition of bureaucratic "diversity;" the collapse of Christianity and traditional religious restraints; the sexual revolution; the weakening of the family; radical gender theory and the rising hostility between the sexes; terrorism and its gradual accommodation by democratic governments and institutions; the smothering of national sovereignty by "global governance;" the rise of anti-national elites in Western societies; the post-communist crises of conservatism; the extraordinary recent resurrection of "socialism" as a social panacea among the young; the economic consequences of environmentalism-all have coalesced into a brewing social revolution that leaves most ordinary people feeling dispossessed in their countries and losing the future. In this series of essays written over the course of a storied career, John O'Sullivan, a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and editor of National Review shows how this revolution has emerged and how this revolution can be resisted.

Nuclear Agendas in Japan and Taiwan compares practical management cases regarding nuclear energy in regional neighbouring partners: Japan and Taiwan. An introductory overview of Japan's nuclear policy leads to the specification of important factors tangible in everyday life. What we perceive as knowledge transfer innovation and renewed industrial assessments shift to a regional territory that develops its own rules and practices within the dimension of nuclear energy innovation technology and post-crisis regulatory agendas. This literature-based discussion refers to complementary systems and recovery practices that have been envisioned in a post-Fukushima nuclear adaptive model. Thematic information about environmental effects and institutional partnerships advance the idea of a comparable ecosystem in which deliberative processes undertaken in Japan follow science, technology, and societal (STS) exchanges that form concurrent regional action plans with contextual disaster risk arrangements. Taiwan is an essential complementary innovation case reviewed in this analysis for contextual environmental policy directions. Reflections about regional knowledge transfers and energy innovation technology in Taiwan highlight some history-related factors that can facilitate a specific understanding of regional innovation in Asia-Pacific and local energy innovation partnerships. Nuclear energy organizational plans for Taiwan are introduced in association with the (STS) approach due to comparable socioeconomic dynamics that can deeply influence science and technology enterprises and Taiwanese localities, thereby offering objective participation. In both Japanese and Taiwanese nuclear regulatory cases, this technical account indicates the build-up of communication systems and a regional development framework that has been reformed progressively, but nevertheless shows an increased tendency to classify promotional learning networks through safety and security schemes intertwined with nuclear energy transitions worldwide.

How Rampage Killers Interpret Their Worlds addresses a question that recently has become disturbingly persistent: "What compels a person or a pair without notice and seemingly without any foreseeable benefit to attack numerous individuals, many of whom are strangers, in a single setting?" It considers that query from the vantage point of psychological circumspection - not as evidence of social fragmentation or historical turbulence. In doing so, it fills in the sketch for the seemingly random stimuli for rampage assaults by tracing the sequential development of motivators: the constitutional mindset of the murderer, the disenfranchisement from humanitarian norms, vindictive obsession, fantasy-driven planning, willful (though detached) engagement, and finally the bloody aftermath. The integrative design links the perspectives of three populations that have typically been treated as distinct - school annihilators, workplace avengers, and public executioners. Further, as expert educator Dr. Funk demonstrates, such mass violence is rarely utilitarian but frequently performative. Throughout the work, carefully sourced theory, scientific data, and analytical biographies inform the premises, observations, and conclusions. Synthesizing research from multiple disciplines with carefully constructed case studies, the work once and for all puts to rest the prevailing mystique of the sudden rampaging assailant and reveals the predictable, premeditative nature of the crime. Central to the criminological autopsies are analyses of the words and deeds of the murderers themselves - before, during, and after their massacres.

The issue of African migration since the Covid-19 pandemic depended on novel influences and determinants. The chapters in this edited volume evaluate recent variables that instigated the migration of Africans and assess implications for Africans, Africans in diaspora, and their global reverberations. The volume unites well-researched and theoretically informed empirical studies constructed on qualitative research methodologies. To project significant social science and humanities voices, the book's chapters reinforce theory-building rather than assumptions derived from arm-chair theorizing, journalistic presentations, and subjective personal views. The issue of African migration is fundamentally a matter of human modeling and therefore is never static. As this unique new volume demonstrates, it is consistently value-laden and reminiscent of "politics as an art."

Until now, the influential agents in rampage killings have been described with unsatisfactory generalizations or chalked up to unconscious impulses. Instead of simply attributing lethal decision-making to distorted thinking, Why Rampage Killers Emerge proffers a conceptual tableau to explain the genesis of the mentality that engages in sudden acts of mass violence. As an experienced educator, Dr. Funk applies a multi-disciplinary perspective with case study methods and statistical tools to define the external circumstances and excavate the internalized misconceptions necessary for the formation of a rampageous mindset. Given the breadth of the construct and the anecdotal patterns supporting its categorization, there should be little doubt that an autogenic assailant will conform to the descriptive model diligently surveyed in this text. While by no means excusing the perpetrators of unprovoked mass attacks, this study does offer an explanation for the origins of the foreboding thought processes at work and contains valuable diagnostic implications. As such, it will be useful to mental professionals, school administrators, law enforcement professionals, business managers, and the public at large in the prevention of repeated acts of deadly spectacle. Dr. Funk's premises are studiously supported by rigorous scholarship and engagingly written to attract attentive readers.

What is war today? To answer this question, we can no longer rely on notions of war elaborated in various classic works, because we are faced with a new problem-how to save humankind from annihilation in a total world war involving weapons of mass destruction. The simplest answer is to establish a "Leviathan," whose promise and project is straight forward: cancel all powers except one, which will be universal and absolute, and start a war without end against all free powers and all liberties. This way eventually you will get peace forever. But can Leviathan actually deliver on this promise? And peace at what cost, because Leviathan demands absolute and unlimited power over the entire human race? It is this problem that A Philosophy of War lays out in all its chilling detail. Is there another solution that can bring political and cultural peace to the world? Indeed, there is, and this book next details a very clear path, one that also ensures that we do not become enslaved by Leviathan. Nations, and their "wisdoms" (that is, "religions") can unite as peace becomes possible. If you love liberty and desire peace, then this book is for you.

The Recollections of Sir James Bacon, a leading light in the evolution of English law during the 19th century, casts an unexpectedly amusing and high-spirited light on turbulent times. Celebrated in his maturity as a witty judge whose decisions were rarely challenged, he was born in humble circumstances, one of ten children. His Recollections describe a happy and industrious, albeit Dickensian, childhood that began with leaving school for work at age twelve and ended with him enshrined as one of highest officials in the land. Enterprising and gifted, Sir James's story carries us through his early writings and journalism, through his legal career, to his arrival at the pinnacle of government. Sir James also chronicled the colorful panoply of British society in his times: social and political crises, friends imprisoned for gambling debts, travels to Europe in the era of reaction and revolution, the celebrated legal cases he witnessed, and the fascinating Britons he knew. This fresh account, published after 150 years in the family archive, is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Britain, the evolution of its unparalleled legal tradition, and the extraordinary figures who made it possible.

Hijab: Word of God or Word of Man? is the most comprehensive and exhaustive study of the subject of the Islamic veil to date. According to Muslim authorities, the Islamic veil is a religious obligation. For them, Muslim women who fail to wear the hijab commit a major sin that merits punishment in hell and even eternal damnation. Since the rise of Islamist movements in the twentieth century, some Muslims have gone as far as to mandate fines, imprisonment, physical punishment, rape, and even death for young girls and women who wear so-called "bad hijab," or who fail to veil. What does the Qur'an really say regarding women's dress? What does the hadith literature of Islam teach? How did Muslim women dress throughout history? What impact did culture have on the process? What moral and ethical conclusions can we draw regarding the rules governing women's clothing? These are the questions that are answered in this seminal study.

On July 7, 1944, all remaining Japanese forces on Saipan conducted a massive suicide attack against the American forces that had landed on the island several weeks earlier. At approximately 3am, the Japanese forces rushed southward on the Tanapag Plain and overwhelmed the soldiers of the U.S. Army's 27th Infantry Division. Hundreds of Japanese soldiers continued unimpeded for 1,200 yards, where they came upon the U.S. Marine artillerymen of the 3rd Battalion of the 10th Marine Regiment of the 2nd Marine Division. Direct howitzer and machine gun fire slowed, but did not stop, the massive suicide attack. The howitzer batteries, as well as headquarters battery, were overrun, and the Marines banded together in small pockets with rifles and pistols in an effort to hold off the Japanese. Against formidable odds, the Marines withstood continued Japanese attacks for nearly twelve hours until soldiers from other units fought their way forward and finally stopped the charge. The scene of carnage on the Tanapag Plain the next day was indescribable. The Marines who survived the attack were in shock. Those who observed the aftermath of the battle could not believe it had happened, but it was one of the most dramatic days in military history.

Imposing Fictions aims to ameliorate the growing problem of what Martin Heidegger refers to as psychological and cultural "homelessness" by diagnosing the nature of the latter's current manifestations and offering readings of literature that seek to inspire the genuine, and genuinely subversive, alterity required by an authentic mode of being. Specifically, it advocates for the value of subversive literature and its capacity to impose itself on the multitude of cultural and psychological preconceptions that govern the generalized but deeply personal, contemporary self. Subversiveness in this context implies pushing against the grain of identity formation as commonly dictated by the hegemony of technology. It does so both stylistically and thematically by foregrounding the imperative of figurative death in the service of authenticity. With the theoretical frameworks of Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou as central guideposts, literary texts ranging from genre horror to American and French fiction are examined for their contributions to the legitimization of a metaphoric death drive and a concomitant, ameliorative quality of being that ultimately assumes the form of what some philosophers and fiction writers alike call love.

The Battle of Brandy Station occurred on June 9, 1863. It was the largest cavalry engagement ever to take place in the United States, with just over 20,000 participants. From the opening shots at Beverly Ford, to the final charge on Fleetwood Heights, the Laurel Brigade was in the thick of the fight. This book is a user's guide for visiting and studying the Brandy Station Battlefield while touring sites associated with the Laurel Brigade. Maps and photographs produced in chronological order will assist readers who follow the line of march from the Shenandoah Valley through Culpeper County, Virginia, and across the field of Brandy Station with the most storied brigade of Confederate Cavalry. Photographs of key commanders, artifacts, and locations on the battlefield will bring the stories of these brave soldiers to life.