Bøger udgivet af Stanford University Press

The definitive biography of a distinguished public servant, who as US Secretary of Labor, Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of State, was pivotal in steering the great powers toward the end of the Cold War.Deftly solving critical but intractable national and global problems was the leitmotif of George Pratt Shultz's life. No one at the highest levels of the United States government did it better or with greater consequence in the last half of the 20th century, often against withering resistance. His quiet, effective leadership altered the arc of history. While political, social, and cultural dynamics have changed profoundly since Shultz served at the commanding heights of American power in the 1970s and 1980s, his legacy and the lessons of his career have even greater meaning now that the Shultz brand of conservatism has been almost erased in the modern Republican Party.This book, from longtime New York Times Washington reporter Philip Taubman, restores the modest Shultz to his central place in American history. Taubman reveals Shultz's gift for forging relationships with people and then harnessing the rapport to address national and international challenges, under his motto "e;trust is the coin of the realm"e;-as well as his difficulty standing up for his principles, motivated by a powerful sense of loyalty that often trapped him in inaction. Based on exclusive access to Shultz's personal papers, housed in a sealed archive at the Hoover Institution, In the Nation's Service offers a remarkable insider account of the behind-the-scenes struggles of the statesman who played a pivotal role in unwinding the Cold War.

In this revisionist account of romantic-era poetry and language philosophy, Tristram Wolff recovers vibrant ways of thinking language and nature together.Wolff argues that well-known writers including Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Henry David Thoreau offer a radical chronopolitics in reaction to the "e;uprooted word,"e; or the formal analytic used to classify languages in progressive time according to a primitivist timeline of history and a hierarchy of civilization. Before the bad naturalisms of nineteenth-century race science could harden language into place as a metric of social difference, poets and thinkers try to soften, thicken, deepen, and dissolve it. This naturalizing tendency makes language more difficult to uproot from its active formation in the lives of its speakers. And its "e;gray romanticism"e; simultaneously gives language different kinds of time-most strikingly, the deep time of geologic form-to forestall the hardening of time into progress.Reorienting romantic studies to consider colonialism's pervasive effects on theories of language origin, Wolff shows us the ambivalent position of romantics in this history. His reparative reading makes visible language's ability to reimagine social forms.

What does the term "e;reading"e; mean? Matthew Rubery's exploration of the influence neurodivergence has on the ways individuals read asks us to consider that there may be no one definition.This alternative history of reading tells the stories of "e;atypical"e; readers and the impact had on their lives by neurological conditions affecting their ability to make sense of the printed word: from dyslexia, hyperlexia, and alexia to synesthesia, hallucinations, and dementia. Rubery's focus on neurodiversity aims to transform our understanding of the very concept of reading. Drawing on personal testimonies gathered from literature, film, life writing, social media, medical case studies, and other sources to express how cognitive differences have shaped people's experiences both on and off the page, Rubery contends that there is no single activity known as reading. Instead, there are multiple ways of reading (and, for that matter, not reading) despite the ease with which we use the term. Pushing us to rethink what it means to read, Reader's Block moves toward an understanding of reading as a spectrum that is capacious enough to accommodate the full range of activities documented in this fascinating and highly original book.Read it from cover to cover, out of sequence, or piecemeal. Read it upside down, sideways, or in a mirror. For just as there is no right way to read, there is no right way to read this book. What matters is that you are doing something with it-something that Rubery proposes should be called "e;reading."e;

A captivating biography that celebrates the audacious, inspiring life and works of John Milton, revealing how he speaks to our times.John Milton is unrivalled-for the music of his verse and the breadth of his learning. In this brisk, topical, and engaging biography, Stephen B. Dobranski brushes the scholarly dust from the portrait of the artist to reveal Milton's essential humanity and his unwavering commitment to ideals-freedom of religion and the right and responsibility of all persons to think for themselves-that are still relevant and necessary in our times.Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, is considered by many to be English poetry's masterpiece. Samuel Johnson, not one for effusive praise, claimed that from Milton's "e;books alone the Art of English Poetry might be learned."e; But Milton's renown rests on more than his artistic achievements. In a time of convulsive political turmoil, he justified the killing of a king, pioneered free speech, and publicly defended divorce. He was, in short, an iconoclast, an independent, even revolutionary, thinker. He was also an imperfect man-acrimonious, sometimes mean. Above all, he understood adversity. Afflicted by blindness, illness, and political imprisonment, Milton always sought to "e;bear up and steer right onward"e; through life's hardships.Dobranski looks beyond Milton's academic standing, beyond his reputation as a dour and devout purist, to reveal the ongoing power of his works and the dauntless courage that he both wrote about and exemplified.

While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made.Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "e;world-surrounding ether."e; Further, he explains how nature's vanishing-its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension-became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness-a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world.Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.

On Salafism offers a compelling new understanding of this phenomenon, both its development and contemporary manifestations. Salafism became associated with fundamentalism when the 9/11 Commission used it to explain the terror attacks and has since been connected with the violence of the so-called Islamic State. With this book, Azmi Bishara critically deconstructs claims of continuity between early Islam and modern militancy and makes a counterargument: Salafism is a wholly modern construct informed by specific sociopolitical contexts. Bishara offers a sophisticated account of various movements-such as Wahabbism and Hanbalism-frequently collapsed into simplistic understandings of Salafism. He distinguishes reformist from regressive Salafism, and examines patterns of modernization in the development of contemporary Islamic political movements and associations. In deconstructing the assumptions of linear continuity between traditional and contemporary movements, Bishara details various divergences in both doctrine and context of modern Salafisms, plural. On Salafism is a crucial read for those interested in Islamism, jihadism, and Middle East politics and history.

A navy is a state's main instrument of maritime force. What it should do, what doctrine it holds, what ships it deploys, and how it fights are determined by practical political and military choices in relation to national needs. Choices are made according to the state's goals, perceived threat, maritime opportunity, technological capabilities, practical experience, and, not the least, the way the sea service defines itself and its way of war. This book is a history of the modern U.S. Navy. It explains how the Navy, in the century after 1890, was formed and reformed in the interaction of purpose, experience, and doctrine.

Harry G. Frankfurt begins his inquiry by asking, "e;What is it about human beings that makes it possible for us to take ourselves seriously?"e; Based on The Tanner Lectures in Moral Philosophy, Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right delves into this provocative and original question. The author maintains that taking ourselves seriously presupposes an inward-directed, reflexive oversight that enables us to focus our attention directly upon ourselves, and "e;[it] means that we are not prepared to accept ourselves just as we come. We want our thoughts, our feelings, our choices, and our behavior to make sense. We are not satisfied to think that our ideas are formed haphazardly, or that our actions are driven by transient and opaque impulses or by mindless decisions. We need to direct ourselves-or at any rate to believe that we are directing ourselves-in thoughtful conformity to stable and appropriate norms. We want to get things right."e; The essays delineate two features that have a critical role to play in this: our rationality, and our ability to love. Frankfurt incisively explores the roles of reason and of love in our active lives, and considers the relation between these two motivating forces of our actions. The argument is that the authority of practical reason is less fundamental than the authority of love. Love, as the author defines it, is a volitional matter, that is, it consists in what we are actually committed to caring about. Frankfurt adds that "e;The object of love can be almost anything-a life, a quality of experience, a person, a group, a moral ideal, a nonmoral ideal, a tradition, whatever."e; However, these objects and ideals are difficult to comprehend and often in conflict with each other. Moral principles play an important supporting role in this process as they help us develop and elucidate a vision that inspires our love.The first section of the book consists of the two lectures, which are entitled "e;Taking Ourselves Seriously"e; and "e;Getting It Right."e; The second section consists of comments in response by Christine M. Korsgaard, Michael E. Bratman, and Meir Dan-Cohen. The book includes a preface by Debra Satz.

Exploiting new findings from former East Bloc archives and from long-ignored Western sources, this book presents a wholly new picture of the coming of World War II, Allied wartime diplomacy, and the origins of the Cold War. The author reveals that the story - widely believed by historians and Western wartime leaders alike - that Stalin's purposes in European diplomacy from 1938 on were mainly defensive is a fantasy. Indeed, this is one of the longest enduring products of Stalin's propaganda, of long-term political control of archival materials, and of the gullibility of Western observers.The author argues that Stalin had concocted a plan for bringing about a general European war well before Hitler launched his expansionist program for the Third Reich. Stalin expected that Hitler's war, when it came, would lead to the internal collapse of the warring nations, and that military revolts and proletarian revolutions like those of World War I would break out in the capitalist countries. This scenario foresaw the embattled proletarians calling for the assistance of the Red Army, which would sweep across Europe.The book further shows that the wartime disputes between Stalin and his Western allies originated over the postwar redisposition of the territories Stalin had gained from his pact with Hitler. The situation was complicated by the incautious, unrestricted commitment of support to the Soviet Union first by Churchill and then by Roosevelt, and wartime circumstances provided cover to obscure these diplomatic failures. The early origins of the Cold War described in this book differ dramatically from the usual accounts that see a sudden and surprising upwelling of Cold War antagonisms late in the War or early in the postwar period.

In the Russian Empire of the 1870s and 1880s, while intellectuals and politicians furiously debated the "e;Jewish Question,"e; more and more acculturating Jews, who dressed, spoke, and behaved like non-Jews, appeared in real life and in literature. This book examines stories about Jewish assimilation by four authors: Grigory Bogrov, a Russian Jew; Eliza Orzeszkowa, a Polish Catholic; and Nikolai Leskov and Anton Chekhov, both Eastern Orthodox Russians. Safran introduces the English-language reader to works that were much discussed in their own time, and she situates Jewish and non-Jewish writers together in the context they shared.For nineteenth-century writers and readers, successful fictional characters were "e;types,"e; literary creations that both mirrored and influenced the trajectories of real lives. Stories about Jewish assimilators and converts often juxtaposed two contrasting types: the sincere reformer or true convert who has experienced a complete transformation, and the secret recidivist or false convert whose real loyalties will never change. As Safran shows, writers borrowed these types from many sources, including the novel of education produced by the Jewish enlightenment movement (the Haskalah), the political rhetoric of "e;Positivist"e; Polish nationalism, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Slavic folk beliefs.Rewriting the Jew casts new light on the concept of type itself and on the question of whether literature can transfigure readers. The classic story of Jewish assimilation describes readers who redesign themselves after the model of fictional characters in secular texts. The writers studied here, though, examine attempts at Jewish self-transformation while wondering about the reformability of personality. In looking at their works, Safran relates the modern Eastern European Jewish experience to a fundamental question of aesthetics: Can art change us?

"Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer. Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created"--

"Howard does not outright refute existing interpretations but rather convincingly demonstrates that Chinese arsenal workers developed regional, class-based, and national identities simultaneously."--CHOICE..".[T]his readable work provides important insight into the Nationalist defence sector during the Sino-Japanese War, and is a significant contribution to the study of Chinese labour in wartime Nationalist China."--The International History Review

An incisive demonstration of how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War.Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived?decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War.Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed socialist following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But just before the outbreak of World War II, he had adopted a strong anti-pacifist position, stating that to be a pacifist was equivalent to being pro-Fascist.By carefully combing through Orwell's published works, notably "My Country Right or Left," The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, and his most dystopian and prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky teases apart Orwell's often paradoxical views on patriotism and socialism. The Socialist Patriot is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradictions between Orwell's commitment to socialist ideals and his sharp critique of totalitarianism by demonstrating the centrality of his wartime experiences, giving twenty-first century readers greater insight into the inner world of one of the most influential writers of the modern age.

"The twenty-first century has witnessed a pervasive militarization of aesthetics with Western military institutions co-opting the creative worldmaking of art and merging it with the destructive forces of warfare. In Martial Aesthetics, Anders Engberg-Pedersen examines the origins of this unlikely merger, showing that today's creative warfare is merely the extension of a historical development that began long ago. Indeed, the emergence of martial aesthetics harkens back to a series of inventions, ideas, and debates in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Already then, military thinkers and inventors adopted ideas from the field of aesthetics about the nature, purpose, and force of art and retooled them into innovative military technologies and a new theory that conceptualized war not merely as a practical art, but as an aesthetic art form. This book shows how military discourses and early war media such as star charts, horoscopes, and the Prussian wargame were entangled with ideas of creativity, genius, and possible worlds in philosophy and aesthetic theory (by thinkers such as Leibniz, Baumgarten, Kant, and Schiller) in order to trace the emergence of martial aesthetics. Adopting an approach that is simultaneously historical and theoretical, Engberg-Pedersen presents a new frame for understanding war in the twenty-first century"--