Bøger udgivet af Cornell University Press

Robert Zaretsky is Professor of French History in the Honors College of the University of Houston. He is author of several books, including Nimes at War and Cock and Bull Stories: Folco de Baroncelli and the Invention of the Camargue. Most recently, he is coauthor of The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Human Understanding.

Years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a loosely organized insurgency continues to target American and Coalition soldiers, as well as Iraqi security forces and civilians, with devastating results. In this sobering account of the ongoing violence...

"In this stimulating and important book Lester Little advances the original thesis that, paradoxically, it was the leading practitioners of voluntary poverty, Franciscan and Dominican friars, who finally formulated a Christian ethic which justified the activities of merchants, moneylenders, and other urban professionals, and created a Christian spirituality suitable for townsmen. Little has synthesized a vast body of specialized literature in Italian, German, French, and English to write an interpretive essay which provides a new perspective on the interaction between economic and social forces and the religious movements advocating the apostolic ideal of voluntary poverty...Little's book is a major contribution, not only to the history of the religious movement of voluntary poverty, but also to the interdisciplinary study of the middle ages." --Journal of Social History

In April 1969, one of America's premier universities was celebrating parents' weekend-and the student union was an armed camp, occupied by over eighty defiant members of the campus's Afro-American Society. Marching out Sunday night, the protesters...

Everyone is familiar with big cats--lions tigers, leopards, jaguars--members of the genus Panthera. The smaller cats--members of the genus Felis--are less familiar. This absorbing book presents what is known about the 37 or so species of the world's cats, including abundant information on the much-neglected smaller members of the cat family. 20 color and 101 b&w illustrations.

A major participant in the influential Tel Quel group in France, Jean-Joseph Goux here offers a bold reevaluation of both the Marxist economic model and the Freudian concept of the unconscious. Symbolic Economies makes available for the first time in...

Public concern over sharp increases in undergraduate tuition has led many to question why colleges and universities cannot behave more like businesses and cut their costs to hold tuition down. Ronald G. Ehrenberg and his coauthors assert that...

In Vultures of the World, Keith L. Bildstein provides an engaging look at vultures and condors, seeking to help us understand these widely recognized but underappreciated birds. Bildstein's latest work is an inspirational and long overdue blend of all things vulture. Based on decades of personal experience, dozens of case studies, and numerous up-to-date examples of cutting-edge science, this book introduces readers to the essential nature of vultures and condors. Not only do these most proficient of all vertebrate scavengers clean up natural and man-made organic waste but they also recycle ecologically essential elements back into both wild and human landscapes, allowing our ecosystems to function successfully across generations of organisms. With distributions ranging over more than three-quarters of all land on five continents, the world's twenty-three species of scavenging birds of prey offer an outstanding example of biological diversity writ large. Included in the world's species fold are its most abundant large raptors-several of its longest lived birds and the most massive of all soaring birds. With a fossil record dating back more than fifty million years, vultures and condors possess numerous adaptions that characteristically serve them well but at times also make them particularly vulnerable to human actions. Vultures of the World is a truly global treatment of vultures, offering a roadmap of how best to protect these birds and their important ecology.

In Diasporic Cold Warriors, Chien-Wen Kung explains how the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) sowed the seeds of anticommunism among the Philippine Chinese with the active participation of the Philippine state.From the 1950s to the 1970s, Philippine Chinese were Southeast Asia's most exemplary Cold Warriors among overseas Chinese. During these decades, no Chinese community in the region was more vigilant in identifying and rooting out suspected communists from within its midst; none was as committed to mobilizing against the People's Republic of China as the one in the former US colony. Ironically, for all the fears of overseas Chinese communities' ties to the PRC at the time, the example of the Philippines shows that the "e;China"e; that intervened the most extensively in any Southeast Asian Chinese society during the Cold War was the Republic of China on Taiwan. For the first time, Kung tells the story of the Philippine Chinese as pro-Taiwan, anticommunist partisans, tracing their evolving relationship with the KMT and successive Philippine governments over the mid-twentieth century. Throughout, he argues for a networked and transnational understanding of the ROC-KMT party-state and demonstrates that Taipei exercised a form of nonterritorial sovereignty over the Philippine Chinese with Manila's participation and consent. Challenging depoliticized narratives of cultural integration, he also contends that, because of the KMT, Chinese identity formation and practices of belonging in the Philippines were deeply infused with Cold War ideology.Drawing on archival research and fieldwork in Taiwan, the Philippines, the United States, and China, Diasporic Cold Warriors reimagines the histories of the ROC, the KMT, and the Philippine Chinese, connecting them to the broader canvas of the Cold War and postcolonial nation-building in East and Southeast Asia.

Haunted Dreams is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to cultural representations of adolescence in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Jenny Kaminer situates these cultural representations within the broader context of European and Anglo-American scholarship on adolescence and youth, and she explores how Russian writers, dramatists, and filmmakers have repeatedly turned to the adolescent protagonist in exploring the myriad fissures running through post-Soviet society. Through close analysis of prose, drama, television, and film, this book maps how the adolescent hero has become a locus for multiple anxieties throughout the tumultuous years since the end of the Soviet experiment. Kaminer also directly addresses some of the pivotal questions facing scholars of post-Soviet Russia: Have Soviet cultural models been transcended? Or do they continue to dominate? The figure of the adolescent, an especially potent and enduring source of cultural mythology throughout the Soviet years, provides provocative material for exploring these questions. In Haunted Dreams, Kaminer employs a historical approach to reveal how fantasies of adolescence have mutated and remained constant across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide, focusing on violence, temporality, and gender and the body. Some of the works discussed present the possibility of salvaging the model of the heroic adolescent for a new society. Others, by contrast, relegate this figure to the dustbin of history by evoking disgust or horror, or by unmasking the tragic consequences that ensue from the combination of adolescence, violence, and fantasy.

Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA), a nationwide network of farm cooperatives, is under increasing pressure to expand farmer incomes by adapting coop strategies to changing market incentives. Some coops have adapted more successfully than others. In Betting on the Farm, Patricia L. Maclachlan and Kay Shimizu attribute these differences to three sets of local variables: resource endowments and product-specific market conditions, coop leadership, and the organization of farmer-members behind new coop strategies. Using in-depth case studies and profiles of different types of farmers, Betting on the Farm also explores the evolution of the formal and informal institutional foundations of postwar agriculture; the electoral sources of JA's influence; the interactive effects of economic liberalization and demographic pressures (an aging farm population and acute shortage of farm successors) on the propensity for change within the farm sector; and the diversification of Japan's traditional farm households and the implications for farmer ties with JA.

At the dawn of the Atomic Age, Americans encountered troubling new questions brought about by the nuclear revolution: In a representative democracy, who is responsible for national public safety? How do citizens imagine themselves as members of the national collective when faced with the priority of individual survival? What do nuclear weapons mean for transparency and accountability in government? What role should scientific experts occupy within a democratic government? Nuclear weapons created a new arena for debating individual and collective rights. In turn, they threatened to destabilize the very basis of American citizenship.As Sarah E. Robey shows in Atomic Americans, people negotiated the contours of nuclear citizenship through overlapping public discussions about survival. Policymakers and citizens disagreed about the scale of civil defense programs and other public safety measures. As the public learned more about the dangers of nuclear fallout, critics articulated concerns about whether the federal government was operating in its citizens' best interests. By the early 1960s, a significant antinuclear movement had emerged, which ultimately contributed to the 1963 nuclear testing ban. Atomic Americans tells the story of a thoughtful body politic engaged in rewriting the rubric of rights and responsibilities that made up American citizenship in the Atomic Age.

Steven K. Green, renowned for his scholarship on the separation of church and state, charts the career of the concept and helps us understand how it has fallen into disfavor with many Americans. In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson distilled a leading idea in the early American republic and wrote of a wall of separation between church and state. That metaphor has come down from Jefferson to twenty-first-century Americans through a long history of jurisprudence, political contestation, and cultural influence. This book traces the development of the concept of separation of church and state and the Supreme Court's application of it in the law. Green finds that conservative criticisms of a separation of church and state overlook the strong historical and jurisprudential pedigree of the idea. Yet, arguing with liberal advocates of the doctrine, he notes that the idea remains fundamentally vague and thus open to loose interpretation in the courts. As such, the history of a wall of separation is more a variable index of American attitudes toward the forces of religion and state. Indeed, Green argues that the Supreme Court's use of the wall metaphor has never been essential to its rulings. The contemporary battle over the idea of a wall of separation has thus been a distraction from the real jurisprudential issues animating the contemporary courts.

In this insightful biography, Burton I. Kaufman explores how the political career of Barack Obama was marked by conservative tendencies that frustrated his progressive supporters and gave the lie to socialist fearmongering on the right. Obama's was a landmark presidency that paradoxically, Kaufman shows, resulted in few, if any, radical shifts in policy. Following his election, President Obama's supporters and detractors anticipated radical reform. As the first African American to serve as president, he reached the White House on a campaign promise of change. But Kaufman finds in Obama clear patterns of classical conservativism of an ideological sort and basic policy-making pragmatism. His commitment to usher in a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society was fundamentally connected to opening up, but not radically altering, the existing free enterprise system. The Affordable Care Act, arguably President Obama's greatest policy achievement, was a distillation of his complex motivations for policy. More conservative than radical, the ACA fitted the expansion of health insurance into the existing system. Similarly, in foreign policy, Obama eschewed the use of force to affect regime change. Yet he kept boots on the ground in the Middle East and supported ballot-box revolts geared toward achieving in foreign countries the same principles of liberalism, free enterprise, and competition that existed in the United States. In estimating the course and impact of Obama's full political life, Kaufman makes clear that both the desire for and fear of change in the American polity affected the popular perception but not the course of action of the forty-fourth US president.

In Forged in the Shadow of Mars, Peter W. Sposato traces chivalry's powerful influence on the mentalite and behavior of a sizeable segment of the elite in late medieval Florence. He finds that the strenuous knights and men-at-arms of the Florentine chivalric elite-a cultural community comprised of men from both traditional and newly emerged elite lineages-embraced a chivalric ideology that was fundamentally martial and violent. Chivalry helped to shape a common identity among these men based on the profession of arms and the ready use of violence against both their peers and those they perceived to be their social inferiors. This violence, often transgressive in nature, was not only crucial to asserting and defending personal, familial, and corporate honor, but was also inherently praiseworthy. In this way, Sposato highlights the sharp differences between chivalry and the more familiar civic ideology of the popolo grasso, the Florentine mercantile and banking elite who came to dominate Florence politically and economically during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.As a result, in Forged in the Shadow of Mars, Sposato challenges the traditional scholarly view of chivalry as foreign to the social and cultural landscape of Florence and contests its reputation as a civilizing force. By reexamining the connection between chivalric literature and actual practice and identity formation among historical knights and men-at-arms, he likewise provides an important corrective to assumptions about the nature of elite violence and identity in medieval Italian cities.

In Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger, the veteran journalist Justin Murphy makes the compelling argument that the educational disparities in Rochester, New York, are the result of historical and present-day racial segregation. Education reform alone will never be the full solution; to resolve racial inequity, cities such as Rochester must first dismantle segregation. Drawing on never-before-seen archival documents as well as scores of new interviews, Murphy shows how discriminatory public policy and personal prejudice combined to create the racially segregated education system that exists in the Rochester area today. Alongside this dismal history, Murphy recounts the courageous fight for integration and equality, from the advocacy of Frederick Douglass in the 1850s to a countywide student coalition inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement in the 2010s. This grinding antagonism, featuring numerous failed efforts to uphold the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, underlines that desegregation and integration offer the greatest opportunity to improve educational and economic outcomes for children of color in the United States. To date, that opportunity has been lost in Rochester, and persistent poor academic outcomes have been one terrible result. Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger is a history of Rochester with clear relevance for today. The struggle for equity in Rochester, like in many northern cities, shows how the burden of history lies on the present. A better future for these cities requires grappling with their troubled pasts. Murphy's account is a necessary contribution to twenty-first-century Rochester.

In Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings, Jon Viar Sigursson returns to the Viking homeland, Scandinavia, highlighting such key aspects of Viking life as power and politics, social and kinship networks, gifts and feasting, religious beliefs, women's roles, social classes, and the Viking economy, which included farming, iron mining and metalworking, and trade.Drawing of the latest archeological research and on literary sources, namely the sagas, Sigursson depicts a complex and surprisingly peaceful society that belies the popular image of Norsemen as bloodthirsty barbarians. Instead, Vikings often acted out power struggles symbolically, with local chieftains competing with each other through displays of wealth in the form of great feasts and gifts, rather than arms. At home, conspicuous consumption was a Viking leader's most important virtue; the brutality associated with them was largely wreaked abroad.Sigursson's engaging history of the Vikings at home begins by highlighting political developments in the region, detailing how Danish kings assumed ascendency over the region and the ways in which Viking friendship reinforced regional peace. Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings then discusses the importance of religion, first pagan and (beginning around 1000 A.D.) Christianity; the central role that women played in politics and war; and how the enormous wealth brought back to Scandinavia affected the social fabric-shedding new light on Viking society.

In Who Should Rule at Home? Joyce D. Goodfriend argues that the high-ranking gentlemen who figure so prominently in most accounts of New York City's evolution from 1664 to 1776 were far from invincible and that the degree of cultural power they held has been exaggerated.