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Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) believed that the intersection of time, language, meaning, and culture in the Kojiki had the power ro reveal the voice of archaic Japan. Japan's self-image was changed forever when Motoori's great commentary explicated its myth and song, thereby resurrecting an oral tradition which had been eclipsed by Chinese writing. Book 1 of the commentary outlines the nativist ideology and philological principles underlying the whole endeavor, and is key to understanding Motoori's contribution to literary theory, political thought, and linguistic investigation. The preface by Naoki Sakai grounds the significance of the work in the context of eighteenth century discouse, and Ann Wehmeyer's biographical introduction focuses on the development of Motoori's interest in the language of the Kojiki.
Soviet Samizdat traces the emergence and development of samizdat, one of the most significant and distinctive phenomena of the late Soviet era, as an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. Based on extensive research of the underground journals, bulletins, art folios and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi analyzes the role of samizdat in fostering new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens. Dissidence has been dismissed as an elite phenomenon or as insignificant because it had little demonstrable impact on the Soviet regime. Komaromi challenges these views and demonstrates that the kind of imagination about self and community made possible by samizdat could be a powerful social force. She explains why participants in samizdat culture so often sought to divide "e;political"e; from "e;cultural"e; samizdat. Her study provides a controversial umbrella definition for all forms of samizdat in terms of truth-telling, arguing that the act is experienced as transformative by Soviet authors and readers. This argument will challenge scholars in the field to respond to contentions that go against the grain of both anthropological and postmodern accounts. Komaromi's combination of literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory makes sense of the phenomenon of samizdat for readers today. Soviet Samizdat shows that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime. Instead, samizdat fostered informal communities of knowledge that foreshadowed a similar phenomenon of alternative perspectives challenging the authority of institutions around the world today.
Western Self-Contempt travels through civilizations since antiquity, examining major political events and the literature of ancient Greece, Rome, France, Britain, and the United States, to study evidence of cultural self-hatred and its cyclical recurrence. Benedict Beckeld explores oikophobia, described by its coiner Sir Roger Scruton as "e;the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours,'"e; in its political and philosophical applications. Beckeld analyzes the theories behind oikophobia along with their historical sources, revealing why oikophobia is best described as a cultural malaise that befalls civilizations during their declining days. Beckeld gives a framework for why today's society is so fragmented and self-critical. He demonstrates that oikophobia is the antithesis of xenophobia. By this definition, the riots and civil unrest in the summer of 2020 were an expression of oikophobia. Excessive political correctness that attacks tradition and history is an expression of oikophobia. Beckeld argues that if we are to understand these behaviors and attitudes, we must understand oikophobia as a sociohistorical phenomenon.Western Self-Contempt is a systematic analysis of oikophobia, combining political philosophy and history to examine how Western civilizations and cultures evolve from naive and self-promoting beginnings to states of self-loathing and decline. Concluding with a philosophical portrait of an increasingly interconnected Western civilization, Beckeld reveals how past events and ideologies, both in the US and in Europe, have led to a modern culture of self-questioning and self-rejection.
Banking on Growth Models contends that China's rapid economic rise from the late 1970s to today has been built on and shaped by a highly politicized and inefficient bank-centric financial system. Stephen Bell and Hui Feng argue that if the Chinese growth model drives how key economic sectors interact, no amount of incremental reform can have much impact on the financial system-meaningful reform can stem only from a revised growth model.For a time after the global financial crisis, it appeared that the expansion of a more market-oriented shadow banking system might help sustain China's economic growth. Since around 2015, however, Xi Jinping's regime has reversed this trajectory and placed China's financial system under heavy state control, resulting in slowed economic development and skyrocketing national debt. China's market transition and economic rebalancing are now in doubt, as is the fate of the nation's economy. By pinpointing finance as a vital element of the growth model, Bell and Feng provide a convincing assessment of financial risks and the prospects for economic rebalancing in China.Banking on Growth Models demystifies the world of Chinese banking and finance as it investigates an ever-rising national debt, a declining rate of economic growth, and the possibility of dire and drastic reform by the Asian superpower's government.
Despite the continued fascination with the Virgin Mary in modern and contemporary times, very little of the resulting scholarship on this topic extends to Russia. Russia's Mary, however, who is virtually unknown in the West, has long played a formative role in Russian society and culture. Framing Mary introduces readers to the cultural life of Mary from the seventeenth century to the post-Soviet era. It examines a broad spectrum of engagements among a variety of people-pilgrims and poets, clergy and laity, politicians and political activists-and the woman they knew as the Bogoroditsa. In this collection of well-integrated and illuminating essays, leading scholars of imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia trace Mary's irrepressible pull and inexhaustible promise from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Focusing in particular on the ways in which both visual and narrative images of Mary frame perceptions of Russian and Soviet space and inform discourse about women and motherhood, these essays explore Mary's rich and complex role in Russia's religion, philosophy, history, politics, literature, and art. Framing Mary will appeal to Russian studies scholars, historians, and general readers interested in religion and Russian culture.
Japan is the fastest aging country, with the largest super-aged society in the world and growing larger by the day, yet its universal health care costs are relatively low. In Health Insurance Politics in Japan, Takakazu Yamagishi draws back the curtain for an international audience and investigates how Japan has been able to control health care costs through health insurance politics.Covering the period from the Meiji Restoration to the Abe Administration, Yamagishi uses a historical institutionalist approach to examine the driving force behind the development of health insurance policies in Japan. Yamagishi pays special attention to the roles of government and medical professionals, the main actors of the policymaking and medical worlds, in this development. Health Insurance Politics in Japan pushes Japan into the spotlight of the international conversation about health care reform.
Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples examines the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in Soviet Central Asia. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single "e;Soviet people."e; Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the USSR's final decades. In this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply "e;Soviet."e; Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the "e;official"e; nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity, that they were unable to speak "e;their own"e; native language, and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples is based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.
Bringing together important new work by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading scholars, Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe approaches emotions as a phenomenon complexly intertwined with society, culture, politics, and history. The stories in this book involve sensitive aristocrats, committed revolutionaries, aggressive nationalists, political leaders, female victims of sexual violence, perpetrators and victims of Stalinist terror, citizens in the former Yugoslavia in the wake of war, workers in post-socialist Romania, Balkan Romani "e;Gypsy"e; musicians, and veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars. These essays explore emotional perception and expression not only as private, inward feeling but also as a way of interpreting and judging a troubled world, acting in it, and perhaps changing it. Essential reading for those interested in new perspectives on the study of Russia and Eastern Europe, past and present, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities who are seeking new and deeper approaches to understanding human experience, thought, and feeling.
In We Showed Baltimore, Christian Swezey tells the dramatic story of how a brash coach from Long Island and a group of players unlike any in the sport helped unseat lacrosse's establishment. From 1976 to 1978, the Cornell men's lacrosse team went on a tear. Winning two national championships and posting an overall record of 42-1, the Big Red, coached by Richie Moran, were the class of the NCAA game. Swezey tells the story of the rise of this dominant lacrosse program and reveals how Cornell's success coincided with and sometimes fueled radical changes in what was once a minor prep school game centered in the Baltimore suburbs. Led on the field by the likes of Mike French and Eamon McEneaney, in the mid-1970s Cornell was an offensive powerhouse. Moran coached the players to be in fast, constant movement. That technique, paired with the advent of synthetic stick heads and the introduction of artificial turf fields, made the Cornell offensive game swift and lethal. It is no surprise that the first NCAA championship game covered by ABC Television was Cornell vs. Maryland in 1976. The 16-13 Cornell win, in overtime, was exactly the exciting game that Moran encouraged and that newcomers to the sport wanted to see. Swezey recounts Cornell's dramatic games against traditional powers such as Maryland, Navy, and Johns Hopkins, and gets into the strategy and psychology that Moran brought to the team. We Showed Baltimore describes how the game of lacrosse was changing-its style of play, equipment, demographics, and geography. Pulling from interviews with more than ninety former coaches and players from Cornell and its rivals, We Showed Baltimore paints a vivid picture of lacrosse in the 1970s and how Moran and the Big Red helped create the game of today.
From the 1850s to the 1920s, women were 30 to 40 percent of all immigrants to the United States and their migration experiences were shaped by similar social, economic, demographic, and cultural forces. In Peasant Maids, City Women, a truly intercultural project, a team of historians follows several groups of women from rural Europe to the bustling streets of Chicago. Focusing on Germans, Irish, Swedes, and Poles-the four largest foreign-born ethnic groups in the city around 1900-the authors analyze the origins of the immigrants and chart how their lives changed, and explore how immigrant women shaped the urbanization process, creating vibrant public spheres for ethnic expression.In concise social histories of four European rural cultures, the authors emphasize the crucial effects of gender. They explore the contrast between each regional culture of origin and the urban experience of ethnic communities in Chicago. The concept of assimilation, they suggest, involves two different dynamics. In the initial phase, adaptation, the new environment demands major changes of incoming immigrants to meet basic needs. The second dynamic, acculturation, involves changes for immigrants and also for the new culture with which they interact.
This edited volume explores the various views on the origins of tetrapods-amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals-views that agree or differ depending in part on how certain fossil animals are classified and which methodology is used for classification. Eighteen chapters by an international group of paleontologists and neontologists here present current hypotheses, emphasizing the kinds of data needed to answer controversial questions, as well as the variety of solutions that emerge from diferent analyses of the same data set.The book is arranged in five sections, each of which contains an overview essay that either describes the development of various schools of thought regarding the origin of the tetrapod group in question or critically summarizes the arguments presented in the section. The first section addresses the origins of tetrapods as a group, focusing on lobe-finned fishes and early tetrapods. Next is a section dealing with amphbians, followed by one on reptiles. The fourth section concerns avian origins, and the final section treats the origins and early diversification of mammals.With an overall goal of stimulating critical evaluation by the reader rather than providing unequivocal answers, this volume will be of particaular interest to vertebrate paleontologists, evolutionary morphologists, and ichthyological, herpatological, avian, and mammalian systematists.
For over two centuries the notion that societies have been sharply divided into women's (private) and men's (public) spheres has been used both to describe and to prescribe social life. More recently, it has been applied and critiqued by feminist scholars as an explanation for women's oppression. Spanning a rich array of historical contexts-from medieval nunneries to Ottoman harems to Paris communes to electronics firms in today's Silicon Valley-the twenty essays collected here offer a pathbreaking reassessment of the significance of the concept of separate spheres.After a theoretical introduction by the editors, certain essays reexamine historians' definitions of public and private realms and show how the imposition of these categories often obscures the realities of power structures and the alterable nature of gender roles. Other chapters consider how the concept of separate domains has been used to control women's actions. Additional essays explore the limits of public/private distinctions, focusing on women's working lives, the role of the state in the family, and the ways in which women including Native North Americans, African-Americans in the birth control movement, and participants in the lesbian bar culture have themselves reshaped the model of separate spheres.Making available the best papers on the public/private theme delivered at the 1987 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Gendered Domains will be welcomed by anyone interested in women's studies, including historians, political scientists, feminist theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers.
In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic. Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers-and racist mobs-did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice. John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles.The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.
"Hua's riveting account of Truman's eight years from 1945 to 1953. Hua is a born storyteller.... He confers depth and sharpness on his writing by placing events within historical context." -China Review International "Demonstrates a deep understanding of the conflicts and divisions within the 'big four'... a thoroughly researched account that acknowledges the complexities of the issues... Hua's study challenges many assumptions about the postwar period.... A good springboard for further research." -American Historical Review
In this illuminating introduction to the world of bats, Tony Hutson reveals the secrets of these extraordinary creatures.Beginning with their anatomy, Hutson explores how bats' unique characteristics have enabled them to evolve to fill a wide variety of habitats and niches. He examines their different life cycles, dietary strategies, migration patterns, and unique feats of echolocation. And he also discusses their predators, parasites, the man-made threats to their ecosystem, and how the viruses harbored by bats can have an impact on humans.Bats also features an appendix of bat families that details the number of genera and species and their distribution and diet.
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings begins as Helen Jukes is entering her thirties and struggling to settle into her new job and home. Then friends gift her a colony of honeybees¿a gift that, according to folklore, brings good luck¿and Jukes embarks on the rewarding, perilous journey of becoming a beekeeper.Jukes writes about what it means to "keep" wild creatures and to live alongside beings whose laws of life are so different from our own. She delves into the history of beekeeping, exploring the ancient¿and sometimes disturbing¿relationship between keeper and bee, human and wild thing. And as her colony grows, the very act of beekeeping seems to open new perspectives, making her world come alive again. A beautifully wrought meditation on uncertainty and hope, feelings of restlessness and home, and how we might better know ourselves, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings shows us how to be alert to these small creatures flitting among us that are yet so vital a force for the continuation of life.
With expert scholars and great sensitivity, Out of Line, Out of Place illuminates and analyzes how the proliferation of internment camps emerged as a biopolitical tool of governance. Although the internment camp developed as a technology of containment, control, and punishment in the latter part of the nineteenth century mainly in colonial settings, it became universal and global during the Great War.Mass internment has long been recognized as a defining experience of World War II, but it was a fundamental experience of World War I as well. More than eight million soldiers became prisoners of war, more than a million civilians became internees, and several millions more were displaced from their homes, with many placed in securitized refugee camps. For the first time, Out of Line, Out of Place brings these different camps together in conversation. Rotem Kowner and Iris Rachamimov emphasize that although there were differences among camps and varied logic of internment in individual countries, there were also striking similarities in how camps operated during the Great War.
In The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn, Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler tell the story of nineteenth-century Brooklyn's domination by upper- and middle-class Protestants with roots in Puritan New England. This lively history describes the unraveling of the control they wielded as more ethnically diverse groups moved into the "City of Churches" during the twentieth century.Before it became a prime American example of urban ethnic diversity, Brooklyn was a lovely and salubrious "town across the river" from Manhattan, celebrated for its churches and upright suburban living. But challenges to this way of life issued from the sheer growth of the city, from new secular institutions¿department stores, theaters, professional baseball¿and from the licit and illicit attractions of Coney Island, all of which were at odds with post-Puritan piety and behavior. Despite these developments, the Yankee-Protestant hegemony largely held until the massive influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants in the twentieth century. As The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn demonstrates, in their churches, synagogues, and other communal institutions, and on their neighborhood streets, the new Brooklynites established the ethnic mosaic that laid the groundwork for the theory of cultural pluralism, giving it a central place within the American Creed.
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